The Ancestor Game - Hardcover

Miller, Alex

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1555972179 ISBN 13: 9781555972172

Publisher: Graywolf Pr, 1994

Synopsis

In the winner of Australia's top prize for fiction, three central characters explore their family histories over the centuries and across the continents, revealing the connections they share and discovering their spiritual destinies.

About this title

About the Author:

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.

From Publishers Weekly:

While noble in ambition and geographically broad in scope, Miller's attempt to unite the spiritual destinies of three disparate characters across a variety of international settings is marred by a less than fluid narrative and confusingly similar character voices. The players include Lang Tzu, the son of a Chinese landowner, who collaborates with the Japanese when they invade the mainland; August Spiess, the family doctor who delivered him; Speiss's artist daughter Gertrude; and Steven Muir, an Australian whose narrative overview is intended to integrate the various parts and pieces of the nomadic plot. Most of the story takes place in mainland China in the 1930s and concerns the decision of several characters to emigrate to Australia following the tumultuous collapse of the feudal mandarin system. Miller's third novel (winner of last year's Miles Franklin Award for Fiction in Australia) will reward those patient readers with a bent for the more obscure spiritual fiction by such writers as Hesse, Goethe and Mann with many eloquent passages about the links between art, identity and sense of place.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Graywolf Pr
• Publication date: 1994
• ISBN 10: 1555972179
• ISBN 13: 9781555972172
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 302