An oriole sings to a dying father. A bleeding-heart dove saves the day. A crow wakes a woman’s resolve. Owls help a boy endure isolation. Cockatoos attend the laying of the dead. Always there are birds in these linked stories that pay homage to kindness and the kinship among women and the planet. From Australia to the Philippines, across cultures and species, kindness inspires resilience amidst loss and grief. Being together ignites resistance against violence. We pull through in the company of others.

Kindness cannot self-isolate. It moves both ways and all ways, like breath.

AWARDS

Highly Commended, ACT Book of the Year Award 2022

Shortlisted, Christina Stead Prize for Fiction, NSW Premier’s Literary Awards 2022

Shortlisted, Steele Rudd Award, Queensland Literary Awards 2022

Shortlisted, Canberra Writers’ Centre Notable Awards 2021

Winner, Canberra Critics’ Circle Award 2021

Most everything has dried up: water, the womb, even the love among lovers. Hunger is rife, except across the border. One night, a village is bombed after its men attempt to cross the border. Nine-year old Amedea is buried underground and sleeps to survive. Ten years later, she wakes with a locust embedded in her brow. This political fable is a girl’s magical journey through the border. The border has cut the human heart. Can she repair it with the story of a small life? This is the Locust Girl’s dream, her lovesong —

For those walking to the border for dear life
And those guarding the border for dear life

AWARDS

Winner, Christina Stead Prize for Fiction, NSW Premier’s Literary Awards 2016

Winner, Juan C. Laya Prize for Best Novel in a Foreign Language (Philippine National Book Award) 2016

Shortlisted, ACT Book of the Year Award 2016

Fish-Hair Woman is a novel of many rooms running between love and war. In 1987 the Philippine government fights a total war against communist insurgency. The village of Iraya is militarised. The days are violent and the nights heavy with fireflies in the river where the dead are dumped. With her twelve-metre hair, Estrella the Fish-Hair Woman trawls the corpses from the water, which now tastes of lemongrass. She falls in love with the visiting Australian writer Tony McIntyre who disappears in the conflict.

AWARDS

Finalist Davitt Awards Best crime and mystery books by Australian women 2013
Winner, Most Underrated Book Award 2013
Winner, Juan C. Laya Prize for Best Novel in a Foreign Language (Philippine National Book Award) 2014

Ten-year-old Noland, a mute lantern maker, imagines that he sees an angel falling from the sky to the slums where he lives. But it’s only an American tourist who is caught in a drive-by shooting of a political journalist. At a busy intersection in Manila, the magical and the seedy collide: shimmering lanterns and poverty, Christmas carols and child prostitution, dreams of friendship and the global ‘war on terror’. A hut in the slums becomes a cathedral and silence is an exchange of breaths.

This raw and hard-hitting novel captures issues of our times and is delicately spare in its prose, with room for silences. Reading it is like walking into the lantern maker’s hut where ‘life must be squeezed to pocket-size, breath must be kept spare — be frugal where life is fragile.’

In her lush debut novel, Merlinda Bobis offers a feast for the senses. Lyrical, funny and elegiac, Banana Heart Summer is a tale of food, family and longing — at once a love letter to mothers and daughters, and a celebration of friendship and community.

Twelve-year-old Nenita is hungry. Growing up poor, she finds magic in the myth of the banana heart and comfort in cooking for the most beautiful woman on Remedios Street. To Nenita, food is like her mother’s love, out of reach and much desired like the fragrant sticky rice with sweet anise, the sorrowful peccadillo, or the spicy Bicol Express that whet and challenge the palate and the heart — how to endure this delectable argument of flavours; how to find the balance between love and anger.

AWARDS

Winner, Gintong Aklat Award (Golden Book Award) 2006

Shortlisted, Australian Literature Society Gold Medal 2006

An anomalous kiss. A white turtle ferrying the dreams of the dead. A working siesta in a five-star hotel. A woman’s twelve-metre hair trawling corpses from a river. Or a queue of longings in Darlinghurst. These enigmatic tales are stories of chance and hope. Alternately mythic, wistful or quirky, Merlinda Bobis’ tales resonate with an original and confident storytelling voice.

AWARDS

Winner, Steele Rudd Award (Best Published Collection of Australian Short Stories) 2000

Winner, Philippine National Book Award 2016

Winner, Judges’ Choice Award, Bumbershoot Bookfair, Seattle Arts Festival for US edition: The Kissing

Originally published in Australia under the title White Turtle, this collection of short stories by established Filipina writer Merlinda Bobis offers bold and lyrical explorations of postcolonial Filipino experience, at once epic in scope and intimate in detail. Merlinda Bobis, author of plays, poetry, and fiction, writes in both English and Filipino and lives in Australia. White Turtle won the National Book Award for fiction from the Manila Critics Circle.

“Bobis has the rare ability to make poetry out of politics. In her work, the graceful use of metaphor becomes a formidable weapon, blasting escape routes out of stories of poverty and oppression.”

– Rachel Cunneen, Amida Magazine

A village holding back the rising of the moon. A white turtle ferrying dreams of the dead. A queue of longings in Sydney. A river sweet with lemon grass. A working siesta in a five­-star hotel. An anomalous kiss in Iraya. Or the secret of the tightening shoes. These are among the twenty-­three dream stories that Merlinda Bobis conjures between the Philippines and Australia. The mythic weave with the wistful, the quirky with the visionary, and always in a storytelling voice that sings.