num_pages: 323
description: WINNER - Best Fiction Victorian Premier's Literary Awards'They kill us they crucify us they throw us to beasts in the arena they sew our lips together and watch us starve. They bugger children in front of their mothers and violate men in front of their wives. The temple priests flay us openly in the streets. We are hunted everywhere and we are hunted by everyone ...We are despised yet we grow. We are tortured and crucified and yet we flourish. We are hated and still we multiply. Why is that? You have to wonder how is it that we not only survive but we grow stronger?'Christos Tsiolkas' stunning new novel Damascus is a work of soaring ambition and achievement of immense power and epic scope taking as its subject nothing less than events surrounding the birth and establishment of the Christian church. Based around the gospels and letters of St Paul and focusing on characters one and two generations on from the death of Christ as well as Paul (Saul) himself Damascus nevertheless explores the themes that have always obsessed Tsiolkas as a class religion masculinity patriarchy colonisation exile; the ways in which nations societies communities families and individuals are united and divided - it's all here the contemporary and urgent questions perennial concerns made vivid and visceral.In Damascus  Tsiolkas has written a masterpiece of imagination and an historical novel of immense power and an unflinching dissection of doubt and faith tyranny and revolution and cruelty and sacrifice.
language: English
title: Damascus
publisher: Allen & Unwin