Spirit House

New
Paperback
2014
$10.32

David is thirteen and confused. His mum has left with her lover and dumped David on his grandparents. David's grandfather, Jimmy, is seventy. He spends his days at the social club grumbling with his three best friends, all of them Jewish-Australian survivors of the enforced labour camps of the WWII Thai-Burma Railroad. But behind their playful backbiting and irresistible wit, Jimmy and his friends are haunted by the ghosts of long-dead comrades, and the only person Jimmy can confide in is a thirteen-year-old from a different world...

Synopsis

David is thirteen and confused. His mum has left with her lover and dumped David on his grandparents. David's grandfather, Jimmy, is seventy. He spends his days at the social club grumbling with his three best friends, all of them Jewish-Australian survivors of the enforced labour camps of the WWII Thai-Burma Railroad. But behind their playful backbiting and irresistible wit, Jimmy and his friends are haunted by the ghosts of long-dead comrades, and the only person Jimmy can confide in is a thirteen-year-old from a different world...

$10.32

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More Information

Format: Paperback
Pages: 368
Edition: Main
Publisher: Atlantic Books
Published: 06 Feb 2014
ISBN 10: 178239088X
ISBN 13: 9781782390886
Book Overview: Witty, wise and deeply moving, Spirit House is a remarkable novel by a major new voice in Australian fiction, a story of the fall of Singapore and life as a POW, of the bonds of life-long friendship and the bonds of grief, and of a young boy making sense of his future while old men try to live with their past.

Media Reviews

A bittersweet story of Burma, Bondi beach and broken lives... A literary cocktail of rare originality * Sunday Telegraph *
The rewards are all over Spirit House, a little masterpiece of comedy and torment that mines new life from the well-told legend of the Thai-Burma railway of World War II * The Australian 'Books of the Year' *

Every other week, it seems, a fine new Australian novel is published. Few, however, can equal the vernacular flair, the originality of treatment of matters that we had thought overly familiar and the narrative drive of Mark Dapin's Spirit House... Dapin is funny, poignant, vibrantly witty and his
novel is a treat from its elegiac opening to its bitter, unexpected close.

* Canberra Times *
This is a book destined for classic status in every sense of the word. It is powerful, poignant, moving, tragic and intensely distressing. It is a feast of a story which will almost simultaneously move you to tears and bring a smile to your face. * ABC News *

Author Bio

Mark Dapin was born in Leeds and moved to Australia in the late 1980s. He has been editor-in-chief of ACP's men's magazines, and a hugely popular newspaper columnist. He has degrees in Social Policy, Art History and Journalism. His first novel, King of the Cross, won the Ned Kelly award. Spirit House is his second novel. He lives in Sydney with his partner and two children.