Whipbird by Robert Drewe

No holds are barred as the Cleary family attempts to put long-held tensions behind them to celebrate a milestone. What could possibly go wrong?

Kungadgee, Victoria, Australia. A weekend in late November, 2014. At Hugh and Christine Cleary’s new vineyard, Whipbird, six generations of the Cleary family are coming together from far and wide to celebrate the 160th anniversary of the arrival of their ancestor Conor Cleary from Ireland. Hugh has been meticulously planning the event for months – a chance to proudly showcase Whipbird to the extended clan. Some of these family members know each other; some don’t.

As the wine flows, it promises to be an eventful couple of days.

Comic, topical, honest, sharply intelligent, and, above all, sympathetic, Robert Drewe’s exhilarating new novel tells a classic Australian family saga as it has never been told before.

Robert Drewe

Reviews

He writes with humility and clarity, in spare, uncomplicated prose, with a storyteller's gift in short and long fiction, essay and memoir

David Gaunt, Australian Bookseller & Publisher

Every so often someone writes fiction that ravishes the popular imagination. Robert Drewe … has done it again in Whipbird, an absolutely compelling read and also something more. Like Tsiolkas’s The Slap, it has the great advantage of both a soap element and a massive ensemble effect, beautifully coordinated ... It's a kind of Canterbury Tales standing still, and it's a winner.

The Saturday Paper

Drewe's literary instincts are as impeccable as his ear for the English language is unfaltering . . .

Richard King, Weekend Australian

There's satire, revelation and redemption aplenty in Robert Drewe's latest novel.

Digby Hildreth, Verandah Magazine

Drewe has moved into the forefront of contemporary writing in English

Sydney Morning Herald

One of the most significant novelists currently working

The Guardian (UK)

Drewe’s writing is cinematically immediate and crackles with an intensity of sense

Independent (UK)

One of the undisputed masters of Australian storytelling

ABC Radio National

Trade Paperback

9780670070619

July 31, 2017

Hamish Hamilton

320 pages

RRP $32.99
Online retailers
Or

Find your local bookstore at booksellers.org.au
EBook

9781742537740

July 31, 2017

Penguin eBooks (AU Adult)

320 pages
Online retailers
Or

Find your local bookstore at booksellers.org.au

Extract

A rich cloud of meat smoke drifting slowly across the grapevines and paddocks greeted the members of the Cleary family as they arrived at the vineyard. The tasty mist from a dozen barbecues billowed over the house – the ‘homestead’, as Hugh Cleary called it – and the stable and the rammed-earth wine cellar, and above the rows of newly planted pinot noir vines, and curled up into the blue gums and manna gums bordering the creek.

Now he believed he was a dead person, Hugh’s younger brother Simon ‘Sly’ Cleary peered out of the car window at the gaunt new vines and wondered how long he’d be spending in this gravelly realm between heaven and hell. In the eyes of the former keyboard player for Spider Flower, suffering a delusionary mental belief that he’d lost his vital organs and no longer existed, perhaps this particular phase was Purgatory.