Vernacular Dreams

A shopkeeper’s son rails at his ailing father. A radio announcer’s daughter returns to her country hometown. A trouser salesman joins a small rebellion. And a metaphysical explorer struggles with the nature of islands and their islands ...

These are stories of velodromes and mixed businesses, of cultures old and new, and of ordinary aspirations and their devastating consequences.

Vernacular Dreams builds on the themes of Angelo Loukakis’s award-winning collection For the Patriarch with its stories of identity and alienation, hope and nostalgia, longing and belonging.

“Loukakis writes in a style that might be described as chromatic realism ...

The stories are very finely crafted indeed.”

—Paul Salzman, Australian Book Review