Fiction
Waiting
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
Vic Premier’s Prize – Judges’ Comments
Miles Franklin Award – Judges’ Comments
Prime Minister’s Award – Judges’ Comments
Miles Franklin Award – Judges’ Comments
Peter Kenneally, The Age
Lisa Hill, ANZ LitLovers
Michael McGirr, Australian Book Review
This was a beautifully executed novel and I was sad to have finished it.
The Saturday Paper
HC Gildfind, TEXT Journal