The Minstrels

Gem and Will grow up on a farm above the chasm and pool known as the Minstrels, a site where both are broken, each by the other. One will disappear. One will, eventually, be transformed.

Through her encounters with people and through art, land and language, Gem is remade while the world outside changes and time runs out.

This long-awaited new novel from one of our finest writers is a sweeping epic set in literal and figurative blight in a fictional Australian geography; a work of self, time and the very end of something. Wild, mythic and potent, The Minstrels is an apocalyptic redemption fable that weaves the history and probable fate of the world into the life of one woman.

Eva Hornung was born in Bendigo and now lives in rural South Australia. She is an award-winning writer of literary fiction and criticism whose novels have been shortlisted for many awards including the ALS Gold Medal, the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards, the Steel Rudd Literary Award, the Christina Stead Prize for Fiction and the Miles Franklin Literary Award. Hornung’s highly acclaimed Dog Boy won the Prime Minister’s Literary Award in 2010; The Last Garden won the South Australian Premier’s Prize for Literature in 2018.

‘Utterly compelling.’ Yann Martel on Dog Boy

‘A cut black gem of a book: beautiful, compact, and sinister.’ Australian Book Review on The Last Garden