First Name Second Name

Stephen Bolin, a gay man of mixed Chinese, Irish and Scottish descent, dies in Brisbane and leaves a strange note asking his family to carry his body a thousand miles home to Innisfail, keeping to the backroads and travelling at night. His sisters decide against it, so his corpse sneaks away from the morgue wearing a dead stranger's clothes and walks north on its own, like the jiangshi of Chinese myth, slowly coming apart along the way. His journey alternates with the family's past: a Chinese great-grandfather on the Queensland goldfields of the 1860s and the Irish woman who shares his name, both fleeing debt and racism; Scottish grandparents who arrive as ten-pound Poms; and Stephen's own growing up, his years in London and Brisbane as a gay man, a father who rejects him, and the rise of Pauline Hanson in the 1990s.

AI-generated summary

About the book

Form

Novel

Genres

Family, Migration, Satire (assigned by AI)

Set in

Australia, United Kingdom

First published

2025

ISBN

9780702268809 (University of Queensland Press, Australia)