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ABBEY'S BOOKSELLER PICK ----- On the way to a dinner party she doesn't want to go to, Martha (a clever talented and lawyer who never gets the position she wants) stops at a Fitzroy pub called Cherrywood to buy a bottle of wine. There is something unusual about the place, and the man who serves her, and long after she leaves she finds herself intrigued enough to go back – but it isn't where she thought it was. She spends her weekends methodically combing the streets of Fitzroy, determined to find it – and the man behind the counter.
Decades earlier, Thomas Wrenfether, a Scotsman blessed by fortune and an obliging nature, enters into a business arrangement with a dark and exotic acquaintance. They will build a paddlesteamer to ply the waters of Port Philip Bay, and Ximenon already has sourced the wood to be used. Caught up in a scheme beyond his experience, Thomas becomes obsessed with his project particularly as everything that can go wrong, does...
How these two different stories plait together is part of the joy of reading this clever and imaginative novel. Full of wonderful characters and their thwarted ambitions, of their love and grief, this is in turn, an intricate and playful read. Lindy
From multi-award-winning author Jock Serong comes Cherrywood, an imaginative, darkly playful and deeply meaningful delight, a novel about legacy, community, wonder, love and reinvention.
Praise for Cherrywood:
'A wildly imaginative, intricately woven tale of beauty, love and loss. Serong is an exceptionally gifted writer, and Cherrywood is his best book yet' Mark Brandi
'Beneath its captivating intricacy lies an exploration of grief, love and the haunting proximity of the past ... A work of exuberance, rare charm and, above all, heart' Lucy Treloar
Sublime and haunting' Toni Jordan
'Complex yet inviting ... Intricately plotted, spanning time and space, Cherrywood brings to mind the scope of Richard Powers's The Overstory and David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas, with strong homage to the works of Italo Calvino and Jorge Luis Borges.' Books+Publishing
'As magical as it is mesmerising. Every chapter presents the reader with another storytelling treasure more narratively wondrous than the last. Serong's wild imagination is a gift that keeps on giving.' Trent Dalton
'What an adventure. This beautiful novel of ambition and grief has me feeling ghosts at every step' Tim Rogers
Jock Serong is the author of Quota, winner of the 2015 Ned Kelly Award for Best First Fiction; The Rules of Backyard Cricket, shortlisted for the 2017 Victorian Premier's Award for Fiction, finalist of the 2017 MWA Edgar Awards for Best Paperback Original, and finalist of the 2017 Indie Book Awards Adult Mystery Book of the Year; and On the Java Ridge, which won the Colin Roderick Award and, internationally, the inaugural Staunch Prize (UK), and was shortlisted for the 2018 Indie Awards. He has won praise for his trilogy of historical novels Preservation; The Burning Island, which earned him the ARA Historical Novel Prize and the Historia Award for Historical Crime Fiction (France); and The Settlement, which was shortlisted for the Voss Prize and the ARA Historical Novel Prize.
ABBEY'S BOOKSELLER PICK ----- On the way to a dinner party she doesn't want to go to, Martha (a clever talented and lawyer who never gets the position she wants) stops at a Fitzroy pub called Cherrywood to buy a bottle of wine. There is something unusual about the place, and the man who serves her, and long after she leaves she finds herself intrigued enough to go back – but it isn't where she thought it was. She spends her weekends methodically combing the streets of Fitzroy, determined to find it – and the man behind the counter.
Decades earlier, Thomas Wrenfether, a Scotsman blessed by fortune and an obliging nature, enters into a business arrangement with a dark and exotic acquaintance. They will build a paddlesteamer to ply the waters of Port Philip Bay, and Ximenon already has sourced the wood to be used. Caught up in a scheme beyond his experience, Thomas becomes obsessed with his project particularly as everything that can go wrong, does...
How these two different stories plait together is part of the joy of reading this clever and imaginative novel. Full of wonderful characters and their thwarted ambitions, of their love and grief, this is in turn, an intricate and playful read. Lindy
