author event: jock serong
tuesday 11 october || 6.30pm
In store | Tickets $10 | Bookings essential
It’s been five years since we first hosted Jock Serong for an author talk at Farrells. We have been big fans since his first three novels – Quota, The Rules of Backyard Cricket, and On the Java Ridge – were published. In those five years he has taken a different direction, creating a trilogy of companion novels set in the gritty and brutal Australian colonial era – the Bass Strait historical novels start with Preservation (2018), continue in The Burning Island (2020), and now The Settlement completes the set. We can’t wait to speak to Jock about his latest creative endeavour – we hope you can join us.
The Settlement
Available now
On the windswept point of an island at the edge of Van Diemen’s Land, the Commandant huddles with a small force of white men and women. He has gathered together, under varying degrees of coercion and duress, the last of the Tasmanians, or so he believes. His purpose is to save them—from a number of things, but most pressingly from the murderous intent of the pastoral settlers on their country.
The orphans Whelk and Pipi, fighting for their survival against the malevolent old man they know as the Catechist, watch as almost everything proves resistant to the Commandant’s will. The wind, the spread of disease, the strange black dog that floats in on the prow of a wrecked ship…But above all the chief, the leader of the exiles, before whom the Commandant performs a sordid dance of intimacy and betrayal.
In The Settlement, Jock Serong reimagines in urgent, compelling prose the ill-fated exploits of George Augustus Robinson at the settlement of Wybalenna—a venture whose blinkered, self-interested cruelty might stand for the colonial enterprise itself.
The Burning Island
Available now
Eliza Grayling, born in Sydney when the colony itself was still an infant, has lived there all her thirty-two years. Too tall, too stern—too old, now—for marriage, she looks out for her reclusive father, Joshua, and wonders about his past. There is a shadow there: an old enmity.
When Joshua Grayling is offered the chance for a reckoning with his nemesis, Eliza is horrified. It involves a sea voyage with an uncertain, probably violent, outcome. Insanity for an elderly blind man, let alone a drunkard.
Unable to dissuade her father from his mad fixation, Eliza begins to understand she may be forced to go with him. Then she sees the vessel they will be sailing on. And in that instant, the voyage of the Moonbird becomes Eliza’s mission too.
Irresistible prose, unforgettable characters and magnificent, epic storytelling: The Burning Island delivers everything readers have come to expect from Jock Serong. It may be his most moving, compelling novel yet.
Preservation
Available now
On a beach not far from the isolated settlement of Sydney in 1797, a fishing boat picks up three shipwreck survivors, distressed and terribly injured. They have walked hundreds of miles across a landscape whose features—and inhabitants—they have no way of comprehending. They have lost fourteen companions along the way. Their accounts of the ordeal are evasive.
It is Lieutenant Joshua Grayling’s task to investigate the story. He comes to realise that those fourteen deaths were contrived by one calculating mind and, as the full horror of the men’s journey emerges, he begins to wonder whether the ruthless killer poses a danger to his own family.
On the Java Ridge
Available now
On the Java Ridge, skipper Isi Natoli and a group of Australian surf tourists are anchored off the Indonesian island of Dana. In the Canberra office of Cassius Calvert, Minister for Border Integrity, a federal election looms and a hardline new policy on asylum-seekers is being rolled out.
Not far from Dana, the Takalar is having engine trouble. Among the passengers on board fleeing from persecution are Roya and her mother, and Roya’s unborn sister.
The storm now closing in on the Takalar and the Java Ridge will mean catastrophe for them all.
The Rules of Backyard Cricket
Available now
It starts in a suburban backyard with Darren Keefe and his older brother, sons of a fierce and gutsy single mother. The endless glow of summer, the bottomless fury of contest. All the love and hatred in two small bodies poured into the rules of a made-up game.
Darren has two big talents: cricket and trouble. No surprise that he becomes an Australian sporting star of the bad-boy variety—one of those men who’s always got away with things and just keeps getting.
Until the day we meet him, middle aged, in the boot of a car. Gagged, cable-tied, a bullet in his knee. Everything pointing towards a shallow grave.
About the Author
Beginning in a career in the legal world in Melbourne, Jock’s journey as an author began by dabbling in writing for surf publications such as Surfing World and other magazines, before getting brave enough to try moving beyond sports-writing to tell stories about people and places. His first novel, Quota, won the prestigious Ned Kelly Awards, Best First Crime Novel, 2015. His subsequent novels The Rules of Backyard Cricket and On the Java Ridge were also long- and short-listed for many prestigious literary prizes, with the latter winning both the Colin Roderick Memorial Award and the Staunch Book Prize (UK), in 2018. His first two books in his Bass Strait historical series, Preservation and The Burning Island have also won the ARA Historical Novel Prize and the Historia Award for Historical Crime Fiction (France), respectively.