This is one of those Australian books that looks plain until it cuts you.

Romulus, My Father is Raimond Gaita’s memoir of his childhood in rural Victoria, shaped by his father Romulus: a Romanian migrant, blacksmith, labourer, moral absolutist, and wounded, loving, difficult man.

Around him orbit the child Raimond, his troubled mother Christina, and a small world of migrants, farmers, friends, grief, loyalty, and ordinary cruelties.  Gaita writes with extraordinary restraint about love, mental illness, migration, poverty, landscape, and moral inheritance — not as grand ideas, but as things lived in kitchens, paddocks, hospitals, workshops, silences. A good one for readers of memoir, Australian literature, migrant stories, and books about fathers that do not ask to be forgiven cheaply.

Text Publishing paperback, 1998 reprint. Good reading copy, with light cover wear, page toning, and minor edge wear. Clean internally.