Books in the Brewery – Maylands – Jun:First Name Second Name by Steve MinOn

Book of the Month: First Name Second Name by Steve MinOn

Books in the Brewery is a free casual event combining great beer with good chat and an Aussie novel. Readers and drinkers are invited to take part in a guided conversation with our resident host.

Maylands meetings will be held at 6pm on the second Monday of the month.

Adult readers of all experience are invited to think and talk about books in a safe and encouraging space. Expect to be discussing books from both award-winning Australian authors and new voices from around the country.

About the book: In this darkly ironic novel, a dead man walks back through four generations of family estrangements to recover his lost identity.

The journey will be long and difficult, one thousand miles. Try not to be too obvious. Stick to the backroads. You’ll know you’ve arrived when you get there.

Stephen Bolin leaves a bizarre note by his deathbed, asking his sisters to take his body back to his birthplace in Far North Queensland. When they ignore his request, Stephen’s corpse makes the nocturnal pilgrimage alone. But what is compelling him and what will he find there?

His journey, as a kind of jiangshi, takes him back through his turbulent family history: from his Chinese great-grandfather’s life on the goldfields in 1860s Queensland, to his Scottish grandparents’ migration to Australia as ten-pound Poms, and to his own coming of age and coming out in Brisbane and London.

Original and satirical, First Name Second Name follows four generations of one family through a reckoning with racial, familial and sexual identity.

‘First Name Second Name is a glorious, inventive novel about the experiences of a Chinese–Scottish family, from the goldfields in North Queensland to 1980s Brisbane to the present day. You will be both entertained and moved by this wonderful novel.’ – Mirandi Riwoe