The Ancestor Game

The Ancestor Game by Alex Miller

Steven Muir, August Spiess and his daughter Gertrude, and Lang Tzu all acknowledge a restless sense of cultural displacement, an ambivalence in their relations with the culture of European Australia. Steven left England for Australia as a young man and his one attempt at returning is unsuccessful. August Spiess, although he speaks frequently of returning to his native Hamburg, fails to make the journey, as does his daughter Gertrude. Lang Tzu's very name defines his fate: two characters which in Mandarin signify the son who goes away. The 'game', however, does have winners. For despite their yearnings for the home of their ancestral dreams, a desire to belong somewhere that is truly their own, none of Miller's characters leaves Australia, and each in their own way comes to see that to be at home in exile may be a defining paradox of the European Australian condition: the paradox of belonging and estrangement that perhaps lies uneasily at the heart of all European cultures.

A wonderful novel of stunning intricacy and great beauty-- Michael Ondaatje
Extraordinary fictional portraits of China and Australia. * New York Times Book Review *

Alex Miller has twice won the prestigious Miles Franklin Literary Award, Australia's premier literary prize; the first occasion in 1993 for The Ancestor Game, and again in 2003 for Journey to the Stone Country. He is also an overall winner of the Commonwealth Writers' Prize, for The Ancestor Game, in 1993. British by birth, he now lives in Victoria.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781741142266
ISBN 10	1741142261
Title	The Ancestor Game
Author	Alex Miller
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Allen & Unwin
Year published	2003-09-01
Number of pages	312
Prizes	Winner of Melbourne Prize for Literature 2012 (Australia)
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.