Tony Birch – författare

“A profound allegory of good and evil, and a deep exploration of human interaction, black and white, alternately beautiful and tender, cruel and unsettling.”—Guardian

Australia’s leading indigenous storyteller makes his American debut with this immersive and deeply resonant novel, set in the 1960s, that explores the lengths we’ll go to save the people we love—an unforgettable story of one native Australian family and the racist government that threatens to separate them.

Odette Brown has lived her entire life on the fringes of Deane, a small Australian country town. Dark secrets simmer beneath the surface of Deane—secrets that could explain why Odette''s daughter, Lila, left her one-year-old daughter, Sissy, and never came back, or why Sissy has white skin when her family is Aboriginal. 

For thirteen years, Odette has quietly raised her granddaughter without drawing notice from welfare authorities who remove fair-skinned Aboriginal children from their families. But the arrival of a new policeman with cruel eyes and a rigid by-the-book attitude throws the Brown women''s lives off-kilter. It will take all of Odette''s courage and cunning to save Sissy from the authorities, and maybe even lead her to find her daughter. 

Bolstered by love, smarts, and the strength of their ancestors, Odette and Sissy are an indomitable force, handling threats to their family and their own identities with grace and ingenuity, while never losing hope for themselves and their future.

In The White Girl, Miles Franklin Award-nominated author Tony Birch illuminates Australia’s devastating post-colonial past—notably the government’s racist policy of separating Indigenous children from their families, known today as the Stolen Generations—and introduces a tight-knit group of charming, inspiring characters who remind us of our shared humanity, and that kindness, hope, and love have no limits.

An illuminating essay on the bestselling Noongar writer and author of the Miles Franklin Award–winning novels Benang and That Deadman Dance

'I value Kim Scott's fiction so highly because I feel that his approach is to put the flags aside. That Deadman Dance asks us not to consider who we were so much as who we could be, collectively, in the future.'

Noongar writer Kim Scott has won the Miles Franklin Award twice for his novels. In this moving essay, Tony Birch shows how Scott uses fiction as a pathway to truth. We meet a writer who 'inhabits a range of guises, faces he wears to interrogate the complex and messy frontier history of colonial encounters'. The result is 'new stories' for the nation. This, says Birch, is the work that Kim Scott has been doing for many years.

''Humanity looms large within these pages; the prose is understated and subtle with images deftly wrought. These perfectly realised stories are inflected with the kind of humour reminiscent of Raymond Carver''s dark wit.'' -The Age

 ''Father''s Day is a book with emotion, but not cloying sentiment; it offers sharp observation coupled with empathy. Above all, it is uniquely Australian.''- Sunday Age

Tony Birch has an eye for life lived at the margins and in Father''s Day he brings the streets of the inner-city to life with compassion and dry humour. But he also focus on the relationships that connect us all, particularly the emotional lives of fathers and sons. In subtle, understated prose touched with poetry, this new collection of stories cuts deep into the minor joys and tragedies of ordinary people.