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AbstractHistoryArchive Description
'A stunning, thought-provoking novel about facing up to your family and your future, dealing with timely issues around sexual consent and inherited trauma. Joey is young, indifferent. He’s drifting around Western Sydney unaware of how his passivity might lead him even further adrift, off the rails, into a violent crime.
'Meanwhile his grandmother Elaine – a proud Lebanese woman – tries to hold her family and herself together in the wake of Joey’s actions. In her family, history repeats itself, vices come and go, and uncovering long-buried secrets isn’t always cathartic.
'This gripping and hard-hitting novel reveals the richness and complexity of contemporary Australian life and tests the idea that facing consequences will make us better people.' (Publication summary)
Notes
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Dedication: For my mum, Nawal, and my aunty, Inaam
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Selected as one of the Guardian Australia best Australian books of 2022
Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of
Other Formats
- Sound recording.
Works about this Work
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Best of 2022 in Australian Reading
2023
single work
review
— Appears in: Meanjin Online 2023;
— Review of This All Come Back Now 2022 anthology short story ; Unlimited Futures 2022 anthology short story ; An Exciting and Vivid Inner Life 2022 selected work short story ; Women I Know 2022 selected work short story ; Cautionary Tales for Excitable Girls 2022 selected work short story ; Everything Feels like the End of the World 2022 selected work short story ; The Burnished Sun 2022 selected work short story ; This Devastating Fever 2022 single work novel ; Losing Face 2022 single work novel ; Root and Branch : Essays on Inheritance 2022 selected work essay ; People Who Lunch : Essays on Work, Leisure and Loose Living 2022 selected work essay ; The Diplomat 2022 single work novel -
Diminished Patriarchal Dividend
2022
single work
review
— Appears in: Meanjin Online 2022;
— Review of Losing Face 2022 single work novel -
[Review] Losing Face : George Haddad
2022
single work
review
— Appears in: The Monthly , August 2022; (p. 57)
— Review of Losing Face 2022 single work novel 'BOTH ELAINE AND her grandson, Joey, are lying to themselves. Elaine’s pokie addiction is one thing; she performs a delusional bargaining routine while feeding every cent of her pension into the machines each week. Joey’s numbers come up much faster and wreak more devastation; he is hanging out with mates and not-quite-mates, taking drugs, and they rape a young woman' (Introduction) -
George Haddad Losing Face
2022
single work
review
— Appears in: The Saturday Paper , 11-17 June 2022;
— Review of Losing Face 2022 single work novel '“Communities are to be distinguished, not by their falsity or genuineness,” wrote Benedict Anderson, the late, great Irish historian of nationalism, “but in the style in which they are imagined.” It’s a line that should ring in the ears of those who have spent time reading the recent explosion of fictions by Australian authors from Middle Eastern backgrounds. Figures such as Michael Mohammed Ahmad and Omar Sakr have written novels that ache with a sense of lost connection – whether to language, culture, religion, people or place – yet do so in a manner so vivid and charismatic, their woundedness takes on a distinct character.'(Introduction)
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Fractured Identity Crisis
2022
single work
review
— Appears in: The Weekend Australian , 21 May 2022; (p. 16)
— Review of Losing Face 2022 single work novel
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Losing Face by George Haddad Review – a Rich, Complex Story of Consent and Coming of Age
2022
single work
review
— Appears in: The Guardian Australia , 6 May 2022;
— Review of Losing Face 2022 single work novel -
The Best New Books Released in May as Selected by Avid Readers and Critics
2022
single work
review
— Appears in: ABC News [Online] , May 2022;
— Review of Losing Face 2022 single work novel ; Daisy and Woolf 2022 single work novel ; An Exciting and Vivid Inner Life 2022 selected work short story ; The Jaguar 2022 selected work poetry -
Fractured Identity Crisis
2022
single work
review
— Appears in: The Weekend Australian , 21 May 2022; (p. 16)
— Review of Losing Face 2022 single work novel -
George Haddad Losing Face
2022
single work
review
— Appears in: The Saturday Paper , 11-17 June 2022;
— Review of Losing Face 2022 single work novel '“Communities are to be distinguished, not by their falsity or genuineness,” wrote Benedict Anderson, the late, great Irish historian of nationalism, “but in the style in which they are imagined.” It’s a line that should ring in the ears of those who have spent time reading the recent explosion of fictions by Australian authors from Middle Eastern backgrounds. Figures such as Michael Mohammed Ahmad and Omar Sakr have written novels that ache with a sense of lost connection – whether to language, culture, religion, people or place – yet do so in a manner so vivid and charismatic, their woundedness takes on a distinct character.'(Introduction)
-
[Review] Losing Face : George Haddad
2022
single work
review
— Appears in: The Monthly , August 2022; (p. 57)
— Review of Losing Face 2022 single work novel 'BOTH ELAINE AND her grandson, Joey, are lying to themselves. Elaine’s pokie addiction is one thing; she performs a delusional bargaining routine while feeding every cent of her pension into the machines each week. Joey’s numbers come up much faster and wreak more devastation; he is hanging out with mates and not-quite-mates, taking drugs, and they rape a young woman' (Introduction) -
George Haddad and Omar Sakr Centre Bisexual Arab Australian Protagonists in Their Debut Novels
2022
single work
column
— Appears in: ABC News [Online] , May 2022;
Awards
- 2023 shortlisted Prime Minister's Literary Awards — Fiction
- 2023 shortlisted Small Press Network Book of the Year Award
- 2023 winner The Sydney Morning Herald Best Young Novelist of the Year
- 2023 longlisted Miles Franklin Literary Award
- 2022 shortlisted Readings Prizes — Readings Prize for New Australian Fiction
- Western Sydney, Sydney, New South Wales,