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Patrick Holland

Patrick Holland
Patrick Holland is the author of five books, including The Mary Smokes Boys (2010), longlisted for the Miles Franklin Award and shortlisted for the Age Book of the Year. His work has appeared in the UK, Ireland, Canada, the USA and Japan. His most recent novel is The Darkest Little Room (2012), a thriller set in Saigon.

Patrick Holland reviews 'Blindness and Rage: A Phantasmagoria: A novel in thirty-four cantos' by Brian Castro

September 2017, no. 394 25 August 2017
Lucien Gracq, the hero of Brian Castro’s verse novel Blindness and Rage, wishes to be a writer, though he has written only love letters to women, which achieved tragicomic results, or none at all. When Gracq retires from his job as a town planner in Adelaide, it seems he will have the time and freedom to write the epic he has dreamed of, but he is diagnosed with terminal cancer and given fifty-t ... (read more)

Patrick Holland reviews 'Alfonso' by Felix Calvino

May 2014, no. 361 29 April 2014
Félix Calvino’s short novel tells the story of a young man who moves to Australia to escape Franco’s Spain. The strange thing about the book (given that its author has spent so long in Australia) is how unlike contemporary Australian literature it is. David Malouf has championed Calvino, but then there has always been something essentially Mediterranean about the author of Ransom. Flaubert wa ... (read more)