Questions of Travel
Shortlist year:
2013
Shortlist category:
Fiction
Published by:
Allen & Unwin
About the book
A mesmerising literary novel, Questions of Travel charts two very different lives. Laura travels the world before returning to Sydney, where she works for a publisher of travel guides. Ravi dreams of being a tourist until he is driven from Sri Lanka by devastating events.
Around these two superbly drawn characters, a double narrative assembles an enthralling array of people, places and stories - from Theo, whose life plays out in the long shadow of the past, to Hana, an Ethiopian woman determined to reinvent herself in Australia.
About the author
Michelle de Kretser
Michelle de Kretser was born in Sri Lanka and immigrated to Australia when she was 14. Educated in Melbourne and Paris, Michelle has worked as a university tutor, an editor and a book reviewer. She is the author of The Rose Grower, The Hamilton Case, which won the Commonwealth Prize (SE Asia and Pacific region) and the UK Encore Prize, and The Lost Dog, which won a swag of awards, including: the 2008 NSW Premier's Book of the Year Award and the Christina Stead Prize for Fiction, and the 2008 ALS Gold Medal.
The Lost Dog was also shortlisted for the Vance Palmer Prize for Fiction, the Western Australian Premier's Australia-Asia Literary Award, the Commonwealth Writers' Prize (Asia-Pacific Region) and Orange Prize's Shadow Youth Panel. It was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the Orange Prize for Fiction.
Judges’ comments
Michelle de Kretser has written a brave account of two extraordinary and apparently separate lives, and all the lives that intersected with theirs that will have readers examining their own sense of place in the world.
The two travellers in these gorgeously addictive parallel tales could not be more different: Laura the restless Australian and perpetually dissatisfied tourist, and Ravi the Sri Lankan, forced to become a refugee.
As they criss-cross the world and each others' paths, never quite escaping the ties of home, de Kretser's novel assembles an array of encounters and experiences for each of her travellers to raise questions that are droll, piquant, satirical, sometimes devastating. In prose of sparkling wit, she seduces, teases and challenges her readers into looking at their own assumptions about what it means to be on the move.
