The Solemn Lantern Maker
MERLINDA BOBIS
Ten-year-old Noland, a mute lantern maker, imagines that he sees an angel falling from the sky to the slums where he lives. But it’s only an American tourist who is caught in a drive-by shooting of a political journalist. At a busy intersection in Manila, the magical and seedy collide: shimmering lanterns and poverty, Christmas carols and child prostitution, dreams of friendship and the global ‘war on terror’. A hut in the slums becomes a cathedral and silence is an exchange of breaths.
Pier 9's page for The Solemn Lantern Maker is HERE.
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The Solemn Lantern Maker's launch schedule:
4 March, 6 for 6:30 pm start (Gleebooks, Sydney launch by Wendy Bacon)
7 March, 6 for 6:30 pm start (South Coast Writers' Centre, Wollongong launch by Wendy Bacon)
29 March (Participating in the Contemporary Australian Fiction Festival, Sydney, NSW Writers' Centre)
3 April, 6 pm (Conversation with ABC Radio Producer Jane Ulman at the National Library of Australia, Canberra)
7 April, 11:00-12:30 am (Lecture on Narrative and Politics, Politics Seminar, University of Adelaide)
7 April, 6 pm, Launch at Imprints by Nicholas Jose
28 April, 5:30 (Lecture on Narrative and Politics, University of Melbourne)
29 April, 6 pm (Readings launch by Susan Hawthorne)
22-25 May (Participating in the Sydney Writers' Festival)
