Gregory Day
Gregory Day is a writer, poet and musician whose debut novel The Patron Saint Of Eels (Picador 2005) won the prestigious Australian Literature Society Gold Medal in 2006 and was also shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers Prize for a first novel. His CDs include The Black Tower: Songs from the Poetry of WB Yeats, which was hailed by the Yeats Society of Ireland as the finest musical interpretations of Yeats ever made, and The Flash Road: Scenes From The Building of the Great Ocean Road. His highly acclaimed second novel Ron McCoy’s Sea of Diamonds (Picador 2007) was shortlisted for the 2008 NSW Premiers Prize for fiction.
Greg’s new novel, The Grand Hotel, has just been released by Random House. He lives on the southwest coast of Victoria.
Books by Gregory Day
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The Patron Saint of Eels
In the southern Italian village of Stellanuova, in the 1700s, a Franciscan monk, Fra Ionio, becomes known as the Patron Saint of Eels when he brings a distraught fisherman's yearly catch of eels back from the dead in the village market. When Stellanuova's inhabitants emigrate to Australia in the post World War II migrations of the 1940s, 50s and 60s, the immortal saint is left looking down on an abandoned town. To fulfil his calling, he decides in heaven to migrate with his countrymen and now looks down on the state of Victoria, where he intercedes in matters relating to eels.
In the southern Victorian town of Mangowak, Noel Lea lives with the melancholy inheritance of a place undergoing the gentrifications of contemporary Australia. Along with his oldest friend, Nanette Burns, he longs for a time when life was less complex and unexpected magic seemed to permeate the ocean town and its people. When spring rains flood a nearby swamp and hundreds of eels get trapped in the grassy ditches around Noel's family home, he and Nanette encounter the vibrant Fra Ionio and get more magic than they bargained for.
This novel is a contemporary fable revealing that when life seems dull and cruel it is the power of the natural world, and our ability to imagine it, that can bring the wonder back into living.
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Ron McCoy's Sea of Diamonds
On the wild clifftop of the coastal town of Mangowak, Ron McCoy lives an almost marsupial existence with his elderly mother. He hunts and gathers while the town sleeps; he is acutely shy, but in the privacy of his imagination, fostered as it is by his love of music and the oceanscape of his birth, all things are possible.
Liz and Craig Wilson, meanwhile, are lovers of the surf and the bush. When Craig is offered a job by Colin Batty, Mangowak's larrikin real estate agent, the dream of bringing up their kids away from the city is finally realised.
But working for Batty Real Estate is not as simple as it seems. The surrounding landscape is full of alchemic power and mystery and when Ron McCoy and his mother decide to sell half their land, the subtle generational differences between young and old Australia begin to swirl.
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The Grand Hotel
‘The Grand Hotel is the kind of place—and book—that answers our need for things that can be lacking in our lives: community, eccentricity, fun, freedom, history and magic.’
—Australian Women’s Weekly‘Possibly the best nature writer in the country.’ —Sunday Age
Robbed of his zest for life by the absurd innovations of his local council, including knocking down the only pub in his beloved home town and roofing over a section of the creek to protect swimmers from the rain, artist Noel Lea exiles himself in the hills above Mangowak, on the southwest Victorian coast. He returns to find an unexpected destiny awaits. At a turning point in the town’s history it seems he has a crucial role to play, as the unlikely publican of an even unlikelier hotel.
From the award-winning author of The Patron Saint of Eels and Ron McCoy’s Sea of Diamonds, Gregory Day’s third novel is a witty, earthy and lyrical tour de force that takes some well-aimed swipes at the aspirations and absurdities of contemporary life.
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