Tom Petsinis’s first novel is a meditation on work, unemployment and how that affects a writing practice.

Its protagonist moves through the precarious world of clerical work, while another figure, Senka, begins shaping his experiences into fiction. The interaction produces a doubled narrative in which lived reality and literary invention start being blurred, and the rest of the novel unwinds into this ordinary life, becoming material for somebody else’s imagination.

Published in 1992, Raising the Shadow is within that very 90's bit of Australian fiction deeply interested in bureaucracy, migration, labour and the indignities of institutional life, but Petsinis gives it a metafictional kink. These characters speculate about their fictional counterparts, writers revise reality, and unemployment becomes both material crisis and narrative possibility. Petsinis, himself a Greek-Macedonian migrant to Australia, would return to questions of migration and divided cultural identity in later novels; this was his first. 

Hill of Content, Melbourne, 1992. First edition. Paperback. Moderate shelf and edge wear, with rubbing, creasing and some curling to corners; pages lightly toned. Binding firm and internally clean. Good condition.