What exactly is the message of Robert Rose? One year after his death, twenty-six years after just another of our crashes, knowing the effect it had on his family and friends, and thousands of others who hardly knew him, I want to go back there, I want to examine my brother's life and reanimate him...
Robert Rose was a promising cricketer and footballers in the mould of his father, Bob, Collingwood's greatest player. Robert's brother, Peter, was on the way to a literary career as a poet and later a publisher.
On St Valentine's Day in 1974 a terrible car accident changed the Roses forever. For the next quarter century Robert Rose lived as a quadriplegic.
Rose Boys is Peter Rose's portrait of his brother. It is a heartbreaking account of a family united and ravaged by misfortune: a story of love, courage and endurance.
This bestselling memoir comes with a new introduction by Brian Matthews.
About the Author
Peter Rose was born in 1955 and raised in Wangaratta, in northern Victoria. His father was a legendary player for, and later coach of, the Collingwood Football Club. His older brother also played for Collingwood, and opened the batting for the Victorian state cricket team. After graduating from Monash University, Rose became a bookseller and eventually began working in publishing. His first book of poetry, The House of Vitriol, appeared in 1990. Throughout the 1990s Rose was a publisher at Oxford University Press in Melbourne. During this time he produced two more volumes of poetry: The Catullan Rag (1993) and Donatello in Wangaratta (1998). In 2001, two years after his brother's death, he published Rose Boys. Critically acclaimed and the winner of the 2003 National Biography Award, the memoir became a bestseller. Rattus Rattus: New and Selected Poems and A Case of Knives, Rose's first novel, were published in 2005. Roddy Parr, another novel, followed in 2010. His fifth collection of poetry, Crimson Crop, won a 2012 Queensland Literary Award. Peter Rose has edited two poetry anthologies and his literary journalism has appeared in many publications. Since 2001 he has been the editor of Australian Book Review.
Industry Reviews
'Rose Boys is the wrenching, stunning account of a family living for about a quarter of a century in the sometimes tightening, sometimes loosening, but never absent, grip of a catastrophe.' -- Brian Matthews
'A book of immense emotional force that is a eulogy to his brother, a tribute to his parents and a powerful demonstration of the redemptive quality of suffering.' * Meanjin *
' A deeply felt, passionately uplifting story.' * Weekend Australian *
' A deep family story of suffering, love and passionate devotion, richly and freshly told.' -- Helen Garner
'Rose Boys is an intimate and moving-though never maudlin-story of familial love...often simple, sometimes rich and lyrical, and always cliche free.' * Time *
'A moving story expertly told.' -- Andrew Riemer * Sydney Morning Herald *
'I'm not sure when I last came across someone who has written so powerfully about death.' -- Martin Flanagan * Age *
'Rose's powerful book is about finding words to describe those events that leave us in silence.' -- David McCooey * HEAT *
'Rose Boys is a wonderful story about a relationship between men. It touches core issues of identity and loss but does so in a quietly undemonstrative manner.' -- Michael McGirr * Eureka Street *
'Eloquent, profoundly moving, deep-seeing into the mysteries of human suffering...a special book about a special man and the diminished life he managed so richly to share with others.' * Australian Review of Books *
'Far removed from conventional sports writing, this is a sad and beautiful essay on suffering, fortitude, heroism and love...[it] reads like a fine and sensitive novel.' * Tain *
