Black Rock White City (A S Patrić, Transit Lounge)

Short-story writer A S Patrić’s first full-length offering is a slow-burning tale about a couple worn out by war but trying desperately to carve out a brighter future for themselves. At the heart of Patrić’s novel is Jovan, a refugee from Sarajevo working shifts cleaning the wards of a suburban Melbourne hospital to provide for his beloved wife. Jovan’s new life is far from idyllic and the ignorance and racism he encounters in Australia are compounded by hidden tragedies and anguish from his past, which begin to surface when sinister and anonymous acts of graffiti crop up on the hospital walls. As well as being an excellent novel about racial prejudices, Black Rock White City explores the interaction between language and perception. For example, Jovan’s stilted English dialogue is juxtaposed with the lines of poetry he recites internally—the ‘tracks he can run his mind along’, which offer a connection to pleasures and pains of his former life in Sarajevo. Told with haunting simplicity, the eminently readable Black Rock White City joins Nam Le’s The Boat and Maxine Beneba Clarke’s Foreign Soil as a welcome addition to the canon of accessible stories from Australian authors about the immigrant experience.

Jennifer Peterson-Ward is a communications professional and professional writing academic