Maria leaves the Greek island of Castellorizo with her children to join her husband in Australia, entering a country whose ordinary, seems largely inaccessible to them.

Within are children confronting Australian classrooms without English, adults trying to reproduce home inside unfamiliar surroundings, and a family discovering that relocation produces neither a clean break with the past nor an uncomplicated new beginning.

Published in 1981, and in both Greek and English, Between Two Worlds was Zeny Giles’s first novel and one of the earlier works by a Greek-Australian woman to place migrant experience at the centre of Australian fiction. Giles writes very closely about the embarrassment of not understanding, the pull of inherited customs, homesickness, generational difference and the unstable feeling of belonging simultaneously to two places and completely to neither. Later criticism of Giles’s work has situated the novel within the emergence of Greek-Australian migrant writing, particularly its treatment of cultural conflict, alienation and identity.

Edition / Condition: Saturday Centre Books, Cammeray, NSW, 1981. First edition. Paperback. Moderate shelf wear and handling to covers, with some rubbing, marking and age-toning; internally clean and firmly bound. Good condition.