The Solemn Lantern Maker

Ten-year-old Noland, a mute lantern maker, imagines that he sees an angel falling from the sky to the slums where he lives. But it's only an American tourist who is caught in a drive-by shooting of a political journalist. At a busy intersection in Manila, the magical and the seedy collide: shimmering lanterns and poverty, Christmas carols and child prostitution, dreams of friendship and the global 'war on terror'. A hut in the slums becomes a cathedral and silence is an exchange of breaths. This raw and hard-hitting novel captures issues of our times and is delicately spare in its prose, with room for silences. Reading it is like walking into the lantern maker's hut where 'life must be squeezed to pocket-size, breath must be kept spare - be frugal where life is fragile'.

Merlinda Bobis has published poetry, drama and fiction, including Banana Heart Summer published by Murdoch Books in 2005. Her literary awards include the Prix Italia for Radio Fiction, the Steele Rudd Award for the Best Collection of Australian Short Stories, the Australian Writers' Guild Award, the Ian Reed Radio Drama Prize and the Philippine National Book Award. Merlinda teaches Creative Writing at the University of Wollongong, New South Wales.