'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.
''One rainy Friday evening in the winter of 1993, a taxi swept through the streets of East Melbourne, on its way from the city to Richmond. That year was one of the few remaining when a great deal was known of the world but not yet so much that the world had become over-known. Small gaps remained ...'
'Edinburgh, 1916: A rich Scottish industrialist, Thomas Wrenfether, impulsively embarks on a mad scheme to build a paddlesteamer out of dubiously sourced European cherrywood on the other side of the world, in booming Melbourne, Australia. But nothing goes according to plan.
'Melbourne, 1993: Martha is a clever, lonely and frustrated lawyer. One night, on impulse, she stops at a strange pub in Fitzroy, The Cherrywood, for a bottle of wine. The mysterious building and its inhabitants make an indelible impression, and she slowly begins to deduce odd truths about the pub.
'From multi-award-winning author Jock Serong comes a darkly delicious, playful and rich novel about legacy, community, wonder, love and reinvention - Cherrywood is haunting, magical and a true original.' (Publication summary)
'A Scottish businessman at the beginning of the 20th century. A magical, moving pub in 1990s Melbourne. Ships. Ghosts. A lot of talk about wood – not a metaphor, just wood. Hubris and other human fallibilities. I wanted to love Jock Serong’s Cherrywood – for the ambitiousness and reach of its plot, for its parallels with Enid Blyton’s The Faraway Tree series, for its consideration of colonialism and gentrification – but it left me cold.' (Introduction)
'Intertextual spins on Peter Carey’s 1988 novel Oscar and Lucinda may yet be finding new reading congregations. Carey’s progenitive postcolonial novel refuted landscapes empty of First Nations peoples, less jewel horizon than abject mire and macadam, along which the failed preacher Oscar and his party moved the components of a glass church overland and upriver to Edenic rural Bellingen. A metaphor of failed settler hopes and dreams, the fabulist glass church leitmotif is symbolic of white intrusion, as an omniscient Aboriginal narrator observes in the chapter savagely and simply entitled ‘Glass Cuts’.' (Introduction)
'Intertextual spins on Peter Carey’s 1988 novel Oscar and Lucinda may yet be finding new reading congregations. Carey’s progenitive postcolonial novel refuted landscapes empty of First Nations peoples, less jewel horizon than abject mire and macadam, along which the failed preacher Oscar and his party moved the components of a glass church overland and upriver to Edenic rural Bellingen. A metaphor of failed settler hopes and dreams, the fabulist glass church leitmotif is symbolic of white intrusion, as an omniscient Aboriginal narrator observes in the chapter savagely and simply entitled ‘Glass Cuts’.' (Introduction)
'A Scottish businessman at the beginning of the 20th century. A magical, moving pub in 1990s Melbourne. Ships. Ghosts. A lot of talk about wood – not a metaphor, just wood. Hubris and other human fallibilities. I wanted to love Jock Serong’s Cherrywood – for the ambitiousness and reach of its plot, for its parallels with Enid Blyton’s The Faraway Tree series, for its consideration of colonialism and gentrification – but it left me cold.' (Introduction)
