AustLit

'Alec Patrić's Black Rock White City (2015), a tale of two cities and two war refugees, won the 2016 Miles Franklin Award against the backdrop of an ongoing worldwide refugee crisis. Besides its topicality, this poignant rendition of migrant experience makes readers privy to the lives of suburban Melbournians, invites them to undertake detective work in solving a crime, and takes them on a journey across genres and modes of writing. The immediacy of the first-person narration is interrupted with scattered fragments of poetry, dislodged from Jovan's mind by the graffiti; passages from a novel-in-progress, which mark the beginning of Suzana's regeneration; and flashbacks from the characters' past, pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that readers are completing alongside the search for clues in a murder mystery. [...]it is up to them to decide if they are convinced by the unraveling and the final image in Suzana's admiring eyes of Jovan, "as expressionless as god remaking the world" (248), as he seizes the second chance to protect his family.'  (Publication abstract)