Wish: Text Classics

Peter Goldsworthy

Jul 2013 · Text Publishing

About this ebook

J.J. is back living at home in Adelaide, unemployed and drifting after a messy divorce. Then he is offered a job teaching Sign to Eliza. His new pupil is smart, sensitive, attractive - and a gorilla recently liberated from a medical research laboratory by animal rights activists.

First published in 1995, the third novel by the acclaimed writer Peter Goldsworthy is unique in Australian literature: a dazzling, moving story about scientific experimentation and ethics, language and love.

This edition comes with a new introduction by James Bradley.

Peter Goldsworthy has won the FAW Christina Stead Prize for fiction, the Commonwealth Poetry Prize and a Helpmann Award, shared with the composer Richard Mills, for the opera Batavia. His poetry and novels have been widely translated; four of his novels and the short story 'The Kiss' have been adapted for the stage. His most recent book is the short-story collection Gravel, shortlisted for the ALS Gold Medal for Literature. This year Penguin is publishing His Stupid Boyhood, a comic memoir, and Maestro, his debut novel, is being reissued as an Angus & Robertson Australian Classic.

'[Goldsworthy's] greatest achievement...Brave, brilliant, as intellectually challenging as it is playful, it is testament to a restless and unpredictable imagination.' James Bradley

'Stylish, imaginative, poignant, and hugely unsettling.' Australian

'A deeply satisfying book...represents a new achievement in his fiction...Read it. You won't find another novel like it.' Adelaide Review

About the author

Peter Goldsworthy has won the FAW Christina Stead Prize for fiction, the Commonwealth Poetry Prize and a Helpmann Award, shared with the composer Richard Mills, for the opera Batavia. His poetry and novels have been widely translated; four of his novels and the short story 'The Kiss' have been adapted for the stage. His most recent book is the short-story collection Gravel, shortlisted for the ALS Gold Medal for Literature. This year Penguin is publishing His Stupid Boyhood, a comic memoir, and Maestro, his debut novel, is being reissued as an Angus & Robertson Australian Classic.