The Immigrants: Fabula Mirabilis, or A Wonderful Story
Title: The Immigrants: Fabula Mirabilis, or A Wonderful Story
Author: Moreno Giovannoni
Publisher: Black Inc.
Shortlist: Fiction
In the Victorian town of Mitrefò, tobacco is grown, an Italian cinema and café open, and people travel back and forth from Italy. A boy fishes, wanders the countryside and watches a community form, with its joys, scandals and shared understandings. Interspersed are the ‘grotesques’ – indelible and terrible events that sit alongside the better future they all seek.
In The Immigrants, Moreno Giovannoni depicts a family as they build a new life in a strange land. Through love and exile, industry and tragedy, their unspoken dreams and fears unfold in this astonishing and moving book.
Judges’ Report
The Immigrants presents a rich and tumultuous canvas of the life of an Italian family migrating to 1950s regional Victoria in the quest for an improved life. The family become part of a sprawling Italian migrant community working on tobacco farms and socialising in a local cinema and cafe. Based on the life of his own family, Moreno Giovannoni’s novel is a big-hearted yet brutal portrait of upheaval, marginalisation, violence, community and love. Navigating new lives in an unfamiliar land with hostile locals and little money, the parents and children at the centre of this novel farm hard, love and hate extravagantly, and approach life with grit. Something of a love-hate letter to a colony and its nebulous allure, this story is both an illuminating examination of migrant lives and an illustration of how the act of witnessing forms the character of a child.
Extract
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About the Author
Photo by David Patston
Moreno Giovannoni
VPLA book photography by Shannyn Higgins
The Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards are proudly supported by the Victorian Government.
