Call Me, Julian Davies

With drawings by Phil Day

‘Call Me is that rare thing: a novel of young adulthood told with great compassion, humour and psychological acuity—and without a skerrick of condescension or sentimentality.’ John Clanchy

‘It’s so refreshing this book isn’t being marketed as YA fiction because the adolescent voices it creates are so charming and drolly realised and true-to-life they’ll appeal to a much broader readership. …an immersive and amusing read, thanks largely to the feat of literary ventriloquism (Davies) pulls off.’ The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age.

‘Call Me is not only an engrossing story about the psychic growing-up of its protagonists, but one that also offers provocative commentary on both humanity in general and modern society in particular. …Davies pulls it off, resulting in a book that’s both intelligent and fun to read.’ Whispering Gums.

Call Me is Julian Davies’ seventh novel. Tangentially related to his previous social satire, Crow Mellow, this is a contemporary Australian story of thwarted young love, and an ambitious attempt to take us deep within the lives and experience of two perceptive yet conflicted teenagers in their last year of school. If love beset by complication is a familiar pattern in fiction, then, in this story, complication dances beguilingly between reality and absurdity.

Davies’ previous novels have been short-listed for many prizes: Revival House for the National Book Council Fiction Award and the Commonwealth Writers Best First Book, among others, The Beholder for the NSW Premier’s Fiction Award, and The Boy for the Victorian Premier’s Fiction Award. The Boy has been translated into French, Dutch and Turkish.

Crow Mellow (2014) was illustrated by over 400 drawings by Phil Day, and received numerous positive reviews, including: ‘…we need more books like Crow Mellow—ambitious, unruly and utterly strange.’ Australian Book Review

Lost Art, (2012), a book of essays on cultural dysfunction in the art world, is another project written in collaboration between Julian Davies and Phil Day.

Davies is also the co-author, with Bidda Jones, of Backlash: Australia’s conflict of values over live exports (2016), an in-depth analysis and history of this trade and the 2011 crisis following the release of footage of inhumane slaughter of Australian cattle in Indonesia.

Phil Day has for more than twenty years collaborated with other artists and writers making hand-made books. In 2011 he founded Mountains Brown Press in Melbourne, an umbrella under which he writes, illustrates and binds his own books.

RRP $28.00
ISBN 9780994516541

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