13 - The Contemporary Western Sydney Novel

Summary

In Western Sydney, writers such as Luke Carman, Michael Mohammed Ahmad, and Felicity Castagna have produced novels written from the working-class and multicultural perspectives that are a far cry from mainstream visions of Sydney. Ahmed’s The Tribe (2014) is a multigenerational saga of a Lebanese Australian family that examines ideas of belonging and alienation, inclusion, and exclusion, which touch, but also exceed, identities of ethnicity and religion. Castagna’s novel No More Boats (2017), explores how an Italian migrant to Australia in the 1960s becomes, in the 2000s, a fervent conservative opponent of further migration to Australia by people from Asia and the Middle East. This chapter shows Western Sydney as the place where twenty-first century Australian literature is most vitally happening.