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The Grass Hotel

By Craig Sherborne
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3.48 goodreads logo

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Check link for latest rating. ( 31 ratings, 8 reviews)
Book Hero Magic crafted this summary to help describe this book. While it's new and still learning, it may not be perfect - your feedback is welcome! Summary
The Grass Hotel by Craig Sherborne is a poignant exploration of memory and identity, following a son who returns to his terminally ill mother's makeshift care home, dubbed "the Grass Hotel." As he grapples with her fading memories and their shared history, the novel delicately navigates themes of loss, love, and reconciliation amidst the backdrop of familial duty and the past's lingering shadows.
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Book Hero Magic created this recommendation. While it's new and still learning, it may not be perfect - your feedback is welcome! IS THIS YOUR NEXT READ?

You might enjoy this book if you appreciate deeply moving stories that explore themes of memory, love, and loss. It's a poignant narrative that reflects on the intricacies of familial relationships and is beautifully written with emotional depth, offering a thoughtful and touching journey into the human condition.

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Short and sharp, savage yet tender, and written with a poet’s touch—a bittersweet portrait of mother and son by an award-winning Australian novelist

Book Hero Magic formatted this description to make it easier to read. While it's new and still learning, it may not be perfect - your feedback is welcome! Description

Carry me, son. Do not leave me behind.

Are you listening to me?

Of course you’re listening, you say, and add the F-word. Off you go to cope with a storm. Lucerne armfuls for horses. For cows, rye-spindly hay.

Alone in the paddocks of his grass hotel, a man tends to his beloved horses, Sock and Boy. The voice of his mother—accusatory, fragmenting from dementia—haunts his every move, an excoriating reminder of his failures in the world of people.

The Grass Hotel is a story of damage and repair, of familial obligation and the resentments it can cause. It is also about the profound comfort that a connection with animals can offer.

With its extraordinary use of language, Craig Sherborne’s novel is by turns savage and tender, raw and poetic: a small masterpiece.

Book Hero Magic summarised reviews for this book. While it's new and still learning, it may not be perfect - your feedback is welcome! HOW HAS THIS BEEN REVIEWED?

The Grass Hotel by Craig Sherborne is lauded for its poignant exploration of a mother-son relationship, delivering an unsparing yet humane portrait. Sherborne's mastery of narrative and poetic elements crafts a vivid depiction of familial power dynamics and emotional turbulence, combining natural lyricism with darker themes of resentment and disappointment. The prose is celebrated for its emotional power, evoking both beauty and melancholy.

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Book Details

INFORMATION

ISBN: 9781922458353

Publisher: Text Publishing

Format: Paperback / softback

Date Published: 01 February 2022

Country: Australia

Imprint: The Text Publishing Company

Audience: General / adult

DIMENSIONS

Width: 153.0mm

Height: 234.0mm

Weight: 250g

Pages: 208

Collections

Craig Sherborne Fiction General Fiction Literary Fiction Penguin Books

About the Author

Craig Sherborne’s memoir Hoi Polloi was shortlisted for the Queensland and Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards. The follow-up, Muck, won the Queensland Literary Award for Non-fiction. Sherborne’s debut novel, The Amateur Science of Love, won the Best Writing Prize in the 2012 Melbourne Prize for Literature and was shortlisted for the NSW and Victorian Premiers’ Awards. He has also written two volumes of poetry, and his journalism and poetry have appeared in most of Australia’s leading literary journals and anthologies. His two most recent novels are Tree Palace, shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award, and Off the Record.

Also by Craig Sherborne

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  • Off the Record: A Novel
    A satirical novel by Miles Franklin Literary Award shortlisted author Craig Sherborne, Off the Record stylishly skewers tabloid journalism and male vanity. Callum Smith—Wordsmith, Words for short—is a newspaper journalist of the old school. He knows how to write a story that sings, knows all the tricks of the tabloid trade. And he likes to drink with his colleagues, sometimes...
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  • The Amateur Science of Love
    They say we fall in love. But really we fall in sickness. I lost appetite for food in those two nights with Tilda. My stomach was sunken in its wishbone cavity. Me, I was never sick, but I was sick now, the strangest sickness that made my eyes gleam green with excellent health. They had shiny white edges. My cheeks...
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  • Tree Palace
    Shane, Moira and Midge, along with young Zara and Rory, are 'trants'—itinerants roaming the plains north-west of Melbourne in search of disused houses to sleep in, or to strip of heritage fittings when funds are low. When they find their Tree Palace outside Barleyville, things are looking up. A place to settle down at last? But Zara, 15, is pregnant...
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