Catherine de Saint Phalle

The Hurt is the story of a first relationship at the age of eighteen. But is it? In The Hurt, time is reshuffled and mixed up. As Saint Phalle says, 'Pain ran through my thoughts like a wild animal, making nonsense of past, present and future.' The intriguing narrative is a beguiling mix of memoir and parable, infused with remarkable...

Set in both Prague and Melbourne, Call Me Marlowe captures a man's search for his motherland in the hope of making sense of his life. With a delicate touch, the novel embodies the nature of trauma—both personal and political—in people's lives. Harold Vank loves Marylou, a woman he met in South Korea where she was working as a sex worker,...

From the Stella shortlisted author of Poum and Alexandre, this is a heartwarming novel about longing, absence, and the people we unexpectedly come to love. After many years spent living in Seoul, a young man called Harold drifts back to Australia and rents a room above a fish and chip shop called The Sea & Us. Who he meets and...

A fresh and sparkling book that strikes deep notes as it flows along.' Helen Garner Like the suburb it depicts, On Brunswick Ground teems with lives at once familiar and strange, all beautifully lit by the glint and warmth of Saint Phalle's prose. Shadowed by local tragedy, we come to care for these characters as much as they care for...

This is the story of two flawed eccentrics. Everything they do subverts their firm intention of keeping up appearances. They meet just after the war in liberated Paris but cannot quite free themselves from the many strings attached to them—the old aunts, the sisters, the cousins, the nuns, and the ominous concierges who dog their footsteps. Alexandre is a banker...