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I will tell you why you should draft my story. Because migrant stories are broken. Some parts in a village where we washed our clothing with soot. Some parts in big cities working in factories. How we starved for food in Greece and starved for Greece in Australia.

You don’t know the first thing about me. A son can never see his mother as a woman. You will only see me in relation to you. I have had a thousand lives before you were even a thought. Hospitalised as a child for an entire year. Living as an adult without family in Athens when the colonels took control.

Start when I was born. Describe the village and how beautiful it was. On the side of a mountain but in the middle of a forest. If we walked to a certain point on the edge, we could look over the valley and see rain clouds coming. Sometimes we would see a cat on a roof, we read that as a warning of a storm. When we looked down, we saw the dirt, which was just as rich as the sky. My island, your island, our island.

Sometimes I think God forgot about us because we were poor.

A stunning new novel from the author of Down the Hume and The Pillars, God Forgets About the Poor is a love story to a migrant mother, whose story is as important as any ever told.

PRAISE FOR DOWN THE HUME:

‘Down the Hume should rightly take its place alongside the fiction of Christos Tsiolkas [and] Maxine Beneba Clarke... as work that reflects the reality and occasional ugliness of Australia's multiculturalism.’ - Australian Book Review

‘tough and compelling’ - Christos Tsiolkas

‘essential reading in these times of "border protection"’ - The Saturday Paper

‘Down The Hume's propulsive rhythm feels like entering a strong current. Its fast pace and escalating plot are typical of the noir genre, but it is also filled with unexpected and precise turns of phrase, which can shift quickly from the menial to the lyrical.’ - The Guardian

PRAISE FOR THE PILLARS:

‘The satire in Peter Polites' The Pillars is sharp and jagged, full of acutely observed moments on the streets and in the loungerooms of Sydney.’ - ABC Radio National, The Bookshelf

 

Peter Polites is a novelist from Western Sydney. He has written two acclaimed novels, Down the Hume and The Pillars, which won the 2020 NSW Premier’s Multicultural NSW Literary Award. He also won the 2020 Woollahra Digital Literature Prize for Fiction. In 2021 he was the ACT Writer in Residence at UNSW Canberra.