Launch of A Short History of Longans Avid Reader (Magandjin)

Trent Dalton will be in conversation with Mirandi Riwoe about her novel A Short History of Longans.

‘They said you were a murdering bushranger.’

It’s the winter of 2049 and Daniel is elderly and long isolated. Soon after yet another devastating storm, this time destroying his beloved longan tree, he finds his fragile peace threatened by a growing friendship with a widowed neighbour and the appearance of a young reporter digging into a shameful event buried deep in his past.

As the novel moves back to autumn 2000 and then to summer 1949 and finally to the spring of the mid-nineteenth century, Daniel’s family’s history unspools, until we meet a Chinese bushranger, Ah Yang.

Intriguing and beautifully written, this dazzling novel unravels the secrets and memories of an Irish-Chinese family to explore what it means to belong to place, to ancestors, to ourselves – spanning centuries and generations.

Mirandi Riwoe is the author of Stone Sky Gold Mountain, which won the Queensland Literary Award – Fiction Book Award and the inaugural ARA Historical Novel Prize, and was shortlisted for the Stella Prize and longlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award. Her second novel, Sunbirds, was set in wartime Java during World War II and was shortlisted for the Barbara Jefferis Award. Her debut novella, The Fish Girl, was also shortlisted for the Stella Prize and the Queensland Literary Award – Fiction Book Award. Her work has appeared in Best Australian Stories, Meanjin, Review of Australian Fiction, Griffith Review and Best Summer Stories. Mirandi has a PhD in Creative Writing and Literary Studies and lives in Brisbane.