Reading fragments of his ancestor’s journal Lo Yun Shan gives Australian-born Chinese man Seamus O'Young an odd sensation: familiarity. Their lives are quite different-Shan left China for the goldfields in the mid-19th century-but something links them. As Seamus seeks to understand what it is, and what it means, his mind begins to unravel in Brian Castro’s astonishing debut.

First published in 1983, Birds of Passage was joint winner of The Australian/Vogel National Literary Award the previous year.