Eva Hornung was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin for her last novel, The Last Garden. The one before that, Dog Boy, won the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Fiction and is now a Text Classic, introduced by Yann Martel.
Her latest centres on The Minstrels: a place that carries significant meaning for the local farming community and Indigenous community in and around the country town of Bolton. The Minstrels is a “half-chasm, half-gorge through which the river ran and then reissued, changed”. It’s “the site of various legends, some suicides, accidental deaths and many conceptions”.
Minstrels is the favourite word (“a dry, sibilant, singing word”) of Gem, the novel’s wild-spirited protagonist, who we follow from childhood. The Minstrels are on the border of her family’s land and a neighbour’s. Gem trades access to it for the local Aboriginal community with elder Uncle Jim, who shares language and place-based knowledge with her in return.
