AustLit

'God Forgets About the Poor opens with a chapter-length monologue: a brilliantly fierce, haunted and hilarious tumble of recollection and editorial harangue, directed by a 70-something Greek–Australian woman to her adult son, an author, insistent that he write a book about her: “Start when I was born. Describe the village and how beautiful it was. On the side of a mountain but in the middle of a forest.”' (Introduction)

'Melding memoir and fiction, the author of Down the Hume and the Pillars makes magic and myth from his migrant mother’s life – and reaches beyond that too'

'A popular image of modern Greece is of glittering, blue seas dotted with islands of idyllic beauty. Another is of the ancient Acropolis towering above Athens, cradle of Western civilisation. But when I think of Greece, I also think of its violent and traumatic history, in particular the series of wars and conflicts throughout the first half of the 20th century that left the country in ruins.' (Introduction)

'‘You don’t know the first thing about me,’ a mother tells her son, a writer, in the powerful opening chapter of Peter Polites’ God Forgets About the Poor. ‘A son can never see his mother as a woman. You will only see me in relation to you. I have lived a thousand lives before you were even a thought.’ The woman, who we will find out is called Honoured, dismisses the ‘gay things’ her son has written before. Honoured dares him to write her story instead, of migrating from a village in Greece to the suburbs of Western Sydney. People will love it, she tells him. As a former librarian checking out Captain Corelli’s Mandolin for patrons, she knows Australians love to read about war, romance, and migrants’ suffering.' (Introduction)