A Cherrywood Celebration

Writer Jock Serong in conversation with Corrie Perkin.

Award-winning author and good friend of the Sorrento Writers Festival Jock Serong has a new novel arriving next month. We are thrilled to be hosting an event in Melbourne to welcome the book, and to delve further into the remarkable story of Cherrywood.

In his new novel, the author of The Rules of Backyard Cricket, On the Java Ridge, Preservation and The Settlement has entered the world of magical realism. This is the story of an old and new world living side by side in a Fitzroy pub. The connector is a magnificent paddle steamer called The Cherrywood – the dream of an early 20th Century Scottish entrepreneur whose plan to ferry passengers across Port Phillip Bay caught the young city’s imagination. Decades later, it also captures the heart of Martha, a young, disillusioned solicitor who works with a big Melbourne law firm. On her way to dinner and in need of a bottle of wine, Martha jumps out of her taxi and into another world. And so, the Cherrywood adventure begins. 

HarperCollins publisher Catherine Milne describes Cherrywood as 'daring, original, haunting, magical – this novel is a triumph.' 

She adds: 'It feels like a game-changer for Australian fiction: it has something of the delicate, witty, character-driven storytelling of Peter Carey’s Oscar and Lucinda, the daring of David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, along with a dash of something unworldly and magical, a la The Shadow of the Wind but set in the gritty backstreets of 1990s Fitzroy … but in the end it is simply itself. Cherrywood. Delicious, rich storytelling, with a dark unusual charm, imaginative and intriguing – a big, ambitious, complex puzzlebox of a novel, a true original, and worlds away from what Jock has written before. I cannot wait to get it into readers’ hands.’

We look forward to celebrating with Jock and his family, and hope you’ll join us for our in-conversation.