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, formerly published as Eva Sallis, is an award-winning writer of literary fiction and criticism: her first novel, Hiam, won the Australian/Vogel Literary Award in 1997 and the Nita May Dobbie Award in 1999. Her novel The Marsh Birds won the Asher Literary Award 2005 and was shortlisted for the Age Book of the Year 2005, NSW Premier's Literary Award and Commonwealth Writers' Prize. Hornung's acclaimed Dog Boy was shortlisted for numerous prizes and won the Prime Minister's Literary Award in 2010. Her most recently published book, The Last Garden, won the SA Premier's Prize for Literature in 2018. She lives in rural South Australia.
'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
