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Women & Children
by Tony Birch

Now available in paperback, Women & Children is a powerful, personal novel about women, children and justice, from one of this country's most loved and clear-eyed storytellers.

A$24.99

(Paperback)

Available. Dispatched 2-3 business days

Overview

It’s 1965 and Joe Cluny is living in a working-class suburb with his mum, Marion, and sister, Ruby, spending his days trying to avoid trouble with the nuns at the local Catholic primary school. One evening his Aunty Oona appears on the doorstep, distressed and needing somewhere to stay. As his mum and aunty work out what to do, Joe comes to understand the secrets that the women in his family carry, including on their bodies. Yet their pleas for assistance are met with silence and complicity from all sides. Who will help Joe’s family at their time of need?

Women & Children is a novel about the love and courage between two sisters, and a sudden loss of childhood innocence.

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Sydney Morning Herald

‘Birch writes so convincingly on power and the blinding nature of its corruptive forces … He writes social realism, his metier is those who are economically and socially marginalised, and his deep emotional honesty when telling their stories resonates throughout.’

Weekend Australian

‘Birch throws us straight into the action. There is always urgency and vitality in his stories; there is always a wide terrain. Characters are immediately and completely drawn with just a few words, and do not fit into easily defined moulds’

Books+Publishing

‘Birch's clear eye for detail, as well as for darkness and quirk of character, shines through at every turn.’

Tony Birch

Tony Birch is the author of four novels: Women & Children, which won the 2024 The Age Fiction Book of the Year; The White Girl, winner of the 2020 NSW Premier’s Award for Indigenous Writing, and shortlisted for the 2020 Miles Franklin Literary Award; Ghost River, winner of the 2016 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Indigenous Writing; and Blood, which was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award in 2012. He has also published two poetry books and four short story collections, the most recent of which, Dark as Last Night, won both the 2022 NSW Premier’s Literary Award and the Queensland Literary Award for Fiction. In 2017 he was awarded the Patrick White Literary Award. Tony Birch is an activist, historian and essayist, and is currently the Boisbouvier Chair in Australian Literature at the University of Melbourne.