From multiple award winning author Jock Serong comes Cherrywood an imaginative darkly playful and deeply meaningful delight a novel about legacy community wonder love and reinvention One rainy Friday evening in the winter of 1993 a taxi swept through the streets of East Melbourne on its way from the city to Richmond That year was one of the few remaining when a great deal was known of the world but not yet so much that the world had become over known Small gaps remained Edinburgh 1916 Thomas Wrenfether a rich Scottish industrialist is offered the opportunity to take on a startling project to build a paddle steamer from European cherrywood on the other side of the world in booming Melbourne Australia But nothing goes according to plan Melbourne 1993 Martha is a lonely frustrated lawyer One night on impulse she stops at a strange pub in Fitzroy The Cherrywood for a bottle of wine The building and its inhabitants make an indelible impression and she slowly begins to deduce odd truths about the pub A complex puzzlebox of a novel this is delicious rich storytelling with a dark unusual charm Cherrywood brings to mind the delicate witty character driven storytelling of Peter Carey s Oscar and Lucinda the daring of David Mitchell s Cloud Atlas and a dash of something unworldly a la The Shadow of the Wind it is haunting magical and a true original Cherrywood The imaginative and moving new literary novel from an award winning author for readers of Trent Dalton Robbie Arnott and Daniel MasonJock Serong lives and works on the far southwest coast of Victoria He was a practising lawyer when he wrote Quota and is currently a features writer and the editor of Great Ocean Quarterly He is married with four children who in turn are raising a black dog a rabbit and an unknown number of guinea pigs Quota was his first novel RTC 1460717155