Bestselling author
The stunningly powerful new novel from the author of The Slap.
'They kill us, they crucify us, they throw us to beasts in the arena, they sew our lips together and watch us starve. They bugger children in front of fathers and violate men before the eyes of their wives. The temple priests flay us openly in the streets and the Judeans stone us. We are hunted everywhere and we are hunted by everyone.
We are despised, yet we grow. We are tortured and crucified and yet we flourish. We are hated and still we multiply. Why is that? You must wonder, how is it we survive?'
Christos Tsiolkas' stunning new novel Damascus is a work of soaring ambition and achievement, of immense power and epic scope, taking as its subject nothing less than events surrounding the birth and establishment of the Christian church. Based around the gospels and letters of St Paul, and focusing on characters one and two generations on from the death of Christ, as well as Paul (Saul) himself, Damascus nevertheless explores the themes that have always obsessed Tsiolkas as a writer: class, religion, masculinity, patriarchy, colonisation, refugees; the ways in which nations, societies, communities, families and individuals are united and divided – it's all here, the contemporary and urgent questions, perennial concerns made vivid and visceral.
In Damascus, Tsiolkas has written a masterpiece of imagination and transformation: an historical novel of immense power and an unflinching dissection of doubt and faith, tyranny and revolution, and cruelty and sacrifice.
About the Author
Christos Tsiolkas was born in Melbourne in 1965. He is the author of four novels: Loaded, which was made into the feature film Head-On, The Jesus Man and Dead Europe, which won the 2006 Age Fiction Prize and the 2006 Melbourne Best Writing Award. He won Overall Best Book the Commonwealth Writers' Prize 2009, was shortlisted for the 2009 Miles Franklin Literary Award and won the Australian Literary Society Gold Medal for his latest novel, The Slap. He is also a playwright, essayist and screen writer. He lives in Melbourne.
About the Illustrator
Before training at the Central School of Speech and Drama, Saul practised law for five years in South Africa and London. He has appeared in West End and many other major UK theatres. Saul is artistic director of Lone Star Theatre Company and lives in London.
Industry Reviews
Narrator Saul Reichlin takes on the sizable challenge of dramatizing the early years of the Christian church. One noteworthy example is his account of the transformation of Saul, a Jewish religious leader, into Paul, pillar of the church. Reichlin understands the complex subject matter he has been charged with and takes it very seriously. The chapters are not told in chronological order, yet they make sense because of his careful performance. Some listeners might find his performance a little overdone with the multiple voices and accents used for various characters. This is church history imagined with all the daily struggles of life during this era. Those who have some familiarity will especially enjoy hearing about the lives of Timothy, Lydia, and others. -- AudioFile Magazine
