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image of person or book cover 2305419100434119674.jpg
Image courtesy of publisher's website.
y separately published work icon The Last Garden single work   novel  
Issue Details: First known date: 2017... 2017 The Last Garden
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'The settlement of Wahrheit, founded in exile to await the return of the Messiah, has been waiting longer than expected. Pastor Helfgott has begun to feel the subtle fraying of the community’s faith.

'Then Matthias Orion shoots his wife and himself, on the very day their son Benedict returns home from boarding school.

'Benedict is unmoored by shock, severed from his past and his future. Unable to be inside the house, unable to speak, he moves into the barn with the horses and chooks, relying on the animals’ strength and the rhythm of the working day to hold his shattered self together.

'The pastor watches over Benedict through the year of his crazy grief: man and boy growing, each according to his own capacity, as they come to terms with the unknowable past and the frailties of being human.' (Publication summary)

Notes

  • Dedication: For my father

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

    • Melbourne, Victoria,: Text Publishing , 2017 .
      image of person or book cover 2305419100434119674.jpg
      Image courtesy of publisher's website.
      Extent: 224p.
      Note/s:
      • Published 1 May 2017
      ISBN: 9781925498127

Other Formats

Works about this Work

What I’m Reading Rachel Leary , 2018 single work column
— Appears in: Meanjin Online 2018;
Your Guide to the Miles Franklin Shortlist : A Kaleidoscopic Portrait of a Diverse Nation Jen Webb , 2018 single work column
— Appears in: The Conversation , 23 August 2018; The Guardian Australia , 23 August 2018;

'The Miles Franklin award is famously for “a novel which is of the highest literary merit and presents Australian life in any of its phases”. That’s a very broad palette, yet for most of the award’s existence — 1957 to the present — it has recognised a rather narrow field of “Australian life”.' (Introduction)

The Garden's Keeper David Knight , 2018 single work column
— Appears in: The Adelaide Review , August no. 462 2018; (p. 6-7)

'Adelaide Hills author Eva Hornung is a "little surprised' The Last Garden has attracted the attention of literary judges but her 2017 novel - which is on the Miles Franklin shortlist after winning the South Australian Premier's Award for Fiction earlier this year - is a powerful Australian fable.' (Introduction)

Eva Hornung : The Last Garden Linda Godfrey , 2018 single work essay
— Appears in: The Newtown Review of Books , February 2018;

'Eva Hornung shows us that the story of the Garden of Eden can have a different ending.'

Rigid Doctrine’s False Path to Redemption Diane Stubbings , 2017 single work essay
— Appears in: The Weekend Australian , 6 May 2017; (p. 21)
'In the early 19th century, 38 German Lutheran families, escaping the threat of persecution under the Prussian king, arrived in Port Adelaide, eventually establishing a small settlement in the Adelaide Hills. It was the first of several waves of German immigration to the area, the newcomers building villages and cultivating the land, all the while holding to their own religion, customs and traditions.' (Introduction)
Eva Hornung's The Last Garden 2017 single work essay
— Appears in: The Saturday Paper , 13-19 May 2017;

'The opening sentence of Eva Hornung’s seventh novel, The Last Garden, encapsulates how strange and how mesmerising in her clarity her writing can be:

On a mild Nebelung’s afternoon, Matthias Orion, having lived as an exclamation mark in the Wahrheit settlement and as the capital letter at home, killed himself.'

Cloud Cuckoo Land Pastoral A. P. Riemer , 2017 single work essay
— Appears in: Sydney Review of Books , May 2017;
'The shortlist for the 2010 Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Fiction included works by two world-famous writers, winners of an impressive array of local and international literary prizes. Yet neither Summertime, the third instalment of J.M. Coetzee’s fictionalised autobiography, nor Ransom, David Malouf’s radiant retelling of an episode from the Trojan War, won the award. The prize went to a lesser-known writer, Eva Hornung (formerly Eva Sallis) for a strange and strangely disturbing fable, Dog Boy, set in a decaying city haunted by feral creatures – both human and animal – which comes to be revealed in the course of the novel as present-day Moscow. Now, after a silence of some seven years, Hornung’s new novel reveals again her capacity to surprise, to follow a direction for which there is little precedent in her earlier work.' (Introduction)
'The Last Garden' by Eva Hornung Bernadette Brennan , 2017 single work essay
— Appears in: Australian Book Review , June-July no. 392 2017;
'The epigraph to the first chapter of Eva Hornung’s The Last Garden speaks of Nebelung, a time of great prosperity, joy, and hope for new life. Over the page, Hornung shatters any sense of well-being with an extraordinary opening sentence: ‘On a mild Nebelung’s afternoon, Matthias Orion, having lived as an exclamation mark in the Wahrheit settlement and as the capital letter at home, killed himself.’ The prose just keeps getting better as Hornung counterpoints the consciousness of a man driven to murder and suicide with the heartbreaking innocence of his unknowing adolescent son, Benedict.' (Introduction)
Animal Magnetism Stephen Romei , 2017 single work essay
— Appears in: The Weekend Australian , 29 April 2017; (p. 16)
'Eva Hornung’s first novel in nine years ventures into a bestial world where tragedy and religion meet, writes Stephen Romei.' (Introduction)
Rigid Doctrine’s False Path to Redemption Diane Stubbings , 2017 single work essay
— Appears in: The Weekend Australian , 6 May 2017; (p. 21)
'In the early 19th century, 38 German Lutheran families, escaping the threat of persecution under the Prussian king, arrived in Port Adelaide, eventually establishing a small settlement in the Adelaide Hills. It was the first of several waves of German immigration to the area, the newcomers building villages and cultivating the land, all the while holding to their own religion, customs and traditions.' (Introduction)
Last amended 13 Jul 2021 11:23:51
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