The Red Book

This colourful account of life in India is a joy… It’s finely wrought and expansive fiction that lingers.

— Herald

There is much rich material here… the story of Francoise’s love for Arkay, the monk… is written with intensity and powerful despair.

— The Guardian

Blessed with ambition and talent enough to realise it, The Red Book is a model of what a globalised imagination can do.

— Sunday Herald

[An] exploration of the human desire to shed past lives… Vivid, wise, ambitious and beautiful.

— The List

Francoise, an Australian photographer, travels to Bhopal in India, where twenty years earlier a gas leak killed thousands. There she meets Naga, a Tibetan refugee whose family died in the disaster, and Arkay, a Scottish traveller battling addiction, who has found solace in Buddhism. As a Testament to their time together Francoise assembles photographs from their lives into an album, the “Red Book”. The photographs tell their stories of love struggle and transformation – pointing to the people they have been and who they will become.

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