First Name Second Name

Steve Minon

First Name Second Name
Format
Paperback
Publisher
University of Queensland Press
Country
Australia
Published
4 March 2025
Pages
272
ISBN
9780702268809

First Name Second Name

Steve Minon

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.

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