The Garden of Sorrows

John Hughes and Marco Luccio

In The Garden of Sorrows author John Hughes brings us fourteen fables in which iconic Australian animals take on human qualities. These universal stories are accompanied by evocative, wry etchings by award winning artist, Marco Luccio.

Each fable tells the tale of a different Australian animal: the crocodile, the platypus, the lyrebird, the turtle, the possum, the albatross, the kangaroo, the spider, the Tasmanian tiger, the mosquito, the emu, the koala, the shark, and the ant.

These are reverse fables — in the way that the Antipodes reverse northern hemisphere logic — that cast us back to the flux at the beginning of the world; inchoate nature, the world in a state of formation, Australia, the garden and the inferno. These are New World stories.

The Garden of Sorrows will delight fans of Aesop’s Fables, Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories, Grimm’s fairy tales, and stories by Roald Dahl.

Praise for The Garden of Sorrows:

The Garden of Sorrows is a remarkable book, exerting a fantastic, primeval and often frightening tug over the reader. Entering into its pages it is to be pulled downwards by a deep, twisting water-rope to a lair of brutal turbulence, pathos and startling grief; the bottom-most geology of the human soul.

TROVE JOURNAL

 

… expansively illustrated by Marco Luccio’s etchings … the use of Australian fauna is inspired and works beautifully.

KERRYN GOLDSWORTHY, THE AGE

Book details

PUBLICATION DATE: 2013
FORMAT: Hardcover
EXTENT: 152 pages
SIZE: 235 x 210 mm
ISBN: 9781742585147
RIGHTS: World
CATEGORY: Out of Print,