The Burning Island by Jack Serong
About Jack Serong
Jock Serong’s novels have received the Ned Kelly Award for First Fiction, the Colin Roderick Award and the inaugural Staunch Prize (UK). He lives with his family on Victoria’s far west coast. For further information, visit:
A Quote from Jack Serong
"I'm so surprised and delighted to be on the HNSA Historical Novel prize shortlist. All of us write historical stories because the story struck us so forcefully in the first place, so it's very gratifying when it resonates with others. I feel very honoured to be in company with Gail and Anita, and to have a small part in the re-examining and re-telling of Australia's past."
About The Burning Island
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.
Quotes from the Judging Panel
“Jock Serong’s The Burning Island is a captivating novel that makes the past come alive in an astonishing way. Serong’s luminous prose style conjures a world that is striking for the way it intertwines historical fidelity with imaginative exuberance. The story, set in 1830, centres around thirty-two-year-old Eliza Grayling and her father Joshua Grayling as they undertake a sea voyage around the Furneaux Islands in Bass Strait, in search of an old enemy. Along the way, their journeys and their world-views are irrevocably and satisfying challenged particularly through the character of Tarenorerer, who was a real-life warrior of the Tommeginne people in Emu Bay. Nothing is as it seems in this luminous book. Serong animates the characters and places in his novel with insightful attention to the hierarchies of desire and power, constantly surprising the reader right up until the last page. This is storytelling at its very best.”
