Gilgamesh

A New York Times Notable Book from the author of The Golden Age. “A remarkable study of a young woman’s most literal rite of passage” (The Baltimore Sun).  Gilgamesh is a rich, spare, and evocative novel of encounters and escapes, of friendship and love, of loss and acceptance, a debut that marked the emergence of a world-class talent.   It is 1937, and the modern world is waiting to erupt. On a farm in rural Australia, seventeen-year-old Edith lives with her mother and her sister, Frances. One afternoon two men, her English cousin Leopold and his Armenian friend Aram, arrive—taking the long way home from an archaeological dig in Iraq—to captivate Edith with tales of a world far beyond the narrow horizon of her small town of Nunderup. One such story is the epic of Gilgamesh, the ancient Mesopotamian king who traveled the world in search of eternal life.   Two years later, in 1939, Edith and her young son, Jim, set off on their own journey, to Soviet Armenia, where they are trapped by the outbreak of war. Rich, spare, and evocative, Gilgamesh won The Age Book of the Year Award for Fiction and was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award.   “Bold and beautiful . . . [An] astonishing saga . . . A woman as epic hero? It’s high time.” —Cathleen Medwick, O, The Oprah Magazine