Readings.com.au: Merlinda Bobis

The Solemn Lantern Maker

Ten-year-old Noland, a mute lantern maker, imagines that he sees an angel falling from the sky to the slums where he lives. But it’s only an American tourist who is caught in a drive-by shooting of a political journalist. At a busy intersection in Manila, the magical and seedy collide: shimmering lanterns and poverty, Christmas carols and child prostitution, dreams of friendship and the global ‘war on terror’. A hut in the slums becomes a cathedral and silence is an exchange of breaths.

Banana Heart Summer

The myth of the banana heart inspires 12-year-old Nenita, growing up in a small, impoverished Filippino town. She will appease her family’s hunger and win her violent mother’s affection. Touching, funny, elegaic, this is a truly original book that will remain in your mind, and in your senses, long after you read it.

Summer Was A Fast Train Without Terminals

To love in a language prised from my wishbone. To sing a landscape where village girls once burst the moon with giggles. To dance through the fattest eye of a rice-grain. To do all these in peace and war is the wish embodied in Merlinda Bobis’ poetry.

White Turtle

An anomalous kiss. A white turtle ferrying the dreams of the dead. A working siesta in a five-star hotel. A woman’s twelve-metre hair trawling corpses from a river. Or a queue of longings in Darlinghurst. These enigmatic tales are stories of chance and hope. Alternately mythic, wistful or quirky, Merlinda Bobis’ tales resonate with an original and confident storytelling voice.