'This stunning story collection includes two prize-winning novellas along with an impressive range of historical and contemporary stories, all written by characters who yearn to belong and find acceptance.
'From the award-winning author of Stone Sky Gold Mountain come these superbly crafted stories that explore the inner lives of those who are often ignored or misunderstood.
'We follow a migrant mother who yearns to feel welcomed at a kids' party in a local park; a young skateboarder caught between showing loyalty and being accepted; and an Indonesian maid working far from home who longs for the son she's left behind. Bookending this collection are two stunning novellas: Annah the Javanese re-imagines the world of one of Paul Gauguin's models in nineteenth-century Paris, while the highly acclaimed The Fish Girl reworks a classic W Somerset Maugham story from the perspective of a young Indonesian woman.
'With rich emotional insight and a light touch, these wide-ranging stories reveal hidden desires and human fragility.' (Publication summary)
Epigraph:
Mistake me not for my complexion,
The shadow'd livery of the burnish'd sun.
The Prince of Morroco
The Merchant of Venice, Act 2, Scene 1
William Shakespeare
'It lies on the crisp hospital sheet, absolutely grotesque. Dr Arnold tells us it's called a fetus in few. Our son's unformed twin. Most likely joined via the umbilical cord in gestation, now just a jumble of elephantine bone and skin, about the size of an apricot. Three canines — there's no denying they're teeth — protrude in a jagged line across its circumference. When we first saw it after the operation there was a shock of hair pressed to its side, still moist from having Thomas's stomach juices washed away. It looked like the slick of hair and scum drawn from a shower's plughole. I gagged, felt nausea water my mouth. But the hair, the colour of wheat and nearly ten centimetres long, is dry now, almost glossy. It looks like her hair. Like Hannah's. ' (120)
'Sparked by the description of a 'Malay trollope' in W. Somerset Maugham's story, The Four Dutchmen, Mirandi Riwoe's novella, The Fish Girl tells of an Indonesian girl whose life is changed irrevocably when she moves from a small fishing village to work in the house of a Dutch merchant. There she finds both hardship and tenderness as her traditional past and colonial present collide.
'Told with an exquisitely restrained voice and coloured with lush description, this moving book will stay with you long after the last page.' (Publication summary)
'Short Stories from the award-winning author that continue her exploration of those overlooked and marginalised.'
'The Burnished Sun by Mirandi Riwoe, Danged Black Thing by Eugen Bacon, and Sadvertising by Ennis Ćehić are powerful, inventive, and self-assured short story collections that traverse fractured and contested ground through their often displaced and alienated narrators.' (Introduction)
'The Burnished Sun follows Mirandi Riwoe’s acclaimed historical novel Stone Sky Gold Mountain (2020), the latter about siblings Ying and Lai Yue, who flee China for the Australian goldfields. Writer and historian Yves Rees uses the term counter-historical to characterise the novel’s placement of marginalised histories at its centre. This energy and ethical drive, along with an exquisite attention to the bruising textures of the world and to those who survive them, is a signature of the short fiction collected in The Burnished Sun.' (Introduction)
'The Burnished Sun by Mirandi Riwoe, Danged Black Thing by Eugen Bacon, and Sadvertising by Ennis Ćehić are powerful, inventive, and self-assured short story collections that traverse fractured and contested ground through their often displaced and alienated narrators.' (Introduction)
Mirandi Riwoe on Finding the Story
Astrid Edwards
(interviewer),
2022
24385302
2022
single work
podcast
interview
'Mirandi Riwoe is the author of Stone Sky Gold Mountain, which won the 2020 Queensland Literary Award – Fiction Book Award and the inaugural ARA Historical Novel Prize, and was shortlisted for the 2021 Stella Prize and longlisted for the 2021 Miles Franklin Literary Award. In 2022 she has released The Burnished Sun, a collection of novellas and short stories. Mirandi's work has also appeared in Best Australian Stories, Meanjin, Review of Australian Fiction, Griffith Review and Best Summer Stories.' (Introduction)
