An eerie little folkloric tale, set in a Greek village full of gossip and violence. 

The book draws heavily on Greek oral storytelling traditions, but it is hardly quaint. Its world is full of grotesquerie, erotic obsession, cruelty and comic absurdity: a blind traveller arrives amid news of disasters; Yiorgos the Apeface waits endlessly for replies to his letters; wild animals and strange figures move through stories that seem half remembered, half invented. Recent criticism has described the novel as deliberately transgressive and syncretic, using disappearing Eastern Mediterranean traditions to explore marginalisation, communal anxiety, gender and the unstable border between the social world and the symbolic one.

Epanomitis was born in Australia to a family from northern Greece and spent a year living on her grandparents’ farm there before writing the novel. The Mule’s Foal won the 1992 Australian/Vogel Literary Award and was published by Allen & Unwin in 1993; it later won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book in the South East Asia and South Pacific region.

Edition & condition: Allen & Unwin, St Leonards, NSW, 1993. First edition. Paperback, 150 pp. Light rubbing and shelf wear to covers and edges; internally clean from the pages shown, with the usual light age-toning. Very good condition.