Fiction

Waiting

Waiting book cover
Available from Puncher & Wattmann

Puncher & Wattmann, 2016

Shortlisted for:

  • 2016 Miles Franklin Award
  • 2016 Victorian Premier’s Prize
  • 2017 Prime Minister’s Award

Waiting is a story of two odd couples in prose as marvellously idiosyncratic as its characters. Big is a hefty cross-dresser and Little is little. Both are long used to the routines of boarding house life in the inner suburbs of Melbourne, but Little, with the prospect of an inheritance, is beginning to indulge in the great Australian dream, which has Big worried. Little’s cousin, Angus, is a solitary man who designs lake-scapes for city councils, and strangely constructed fireproof houses for the bushfire zone. A handyman, he meets Jasmin an academic who races in her ideas as much as in her runners. Her head is set on publishing books on semiotics and her heart is turned towards her stalled personal life. All four are waiting, for something if not someone.

Antoni Jach has called Waiting “a bittersweet tale of the marginalised and the searching.” and that it is “Weirdly moving, tender and insightful”, while John Clarke has praised Salom as “a wonderful storyteller”. Sue Woolfe says Waiting contains: “flashes of poetry and sudden insight and such profound compassion (it) should be labelled – WARNING: Could make the reader kinder”.

Praise for Waiting

In his brilliant and unsettling novel Waiting, Philip Salom has unleashed Australia’s oddest literary couple since the elderly twin brothers Arthur and Waldo Brown in Patrick White’s The Solid Mandala (1966).

Brilliant and unsettling … There is a calm to Salom’s prose that speaks of unobtrusive craft and compassion, as when we read how “the lonely meet sometimes, compatibility is indeed a strange thing”. This is an accomplished and absorbing novel.

Peter Pierce, The Australian 

At times cerebral, at times hilarious, and at times devastating, Waiting is peopled with misfit characters who have often been maligned by society. Salom takes great risks with language, plot and pacing, and his poet’s flair for expression resonates through much of the novel. This book is philosophical, erudite and serious, but never takes itself too seriously – a fine and difficult balance to achieve.

Vic Premier’s Prize – Judges’ Comments 

Waiting is poignant, compassionate and droll; it is never maudlin nor idealised. Salom’s prose, poetic and frequently playful, bestows a multiplicity of incidental insights en route, yet never condescends to its subjects nor patronises its readers. As rollicking as it is original and affecting, Waiting is a highly readable addition to Australian literature.

Miles Franklin Award – Judges’ Comments 

Philip Salom’s Waiting is a reflective and subtly powerful novel that focuses on the lives of four very different characters… The novel vibrates with the language of the street and the speaking voices of the many characters is brilliantly captured by Salom, whose poetry background is apparent. The suburban rooming house which is central to the novel reverberates with wit and intensity and the cast of characters that live and die in this boarding house is achingly authentic.

Prime Minister’s Award – Judges’ Comments

Waiting is poignant, compassionate and droll; it is never maudlin nor idealised. Salom’s prose, poetic and frequently playful, bestows a multiplicity of incidental insights en route, yet never condescends to its subjects nor patronises its readers. As rollicking as it is original and affecting, Waiting is a highly readable addition to Australian literature.

Miles Franklin Award – Judges’ Comments 

Towards the end of the book, things change gear, as the strands come tigether: the two couples, the house, the long-awaited Adelaide denouement, fears, hopes and loves acquiring a kind of critical mass that dictates change, however modest. The book becomes heavier and heavier and then as light as air, and all the poetry is still there, waiting for you.

Peter Kenneally, The Age

Waiting is a richly rewarding story, with characterisation and plot that made me see the world differently. Salom has an astute poetic sensibility that makes his sharp observations politically deft and often very amusing, but it’s his empathetic portrayal of misfits that stole my heart.

Lisa Hill, ANZ LitLovers

Waiting is a tour de force of sustained and affectionate wit. It constantly dares the reader to undervalue its characters. It does not romanticise poverty but nor does it impoverish romance. It suggests that there is no such thing as the end of the line.

Michael McGirr, Australian Book Review

This was a beautifully executed novel and I was sad to have finished it.

The Saturday Paper

Waiting is a laugh-out-loud, poignant novel about the struggle of individual mortals to relate to themselves and each other in a brutally capitalist, godless world. This novel explored the very real differences between people even as it reveals the universals that unite them. Our culture needs writers of this calibre to challenge not only how we see ourselves and Others, but how we use language to enable or blinker that seeing.

HC Gildfind, TEXT Journal