The Prodigal

Buy two books by Suneeta Peres da Costa – Saudade and The Prodigal – together at a reduced price.

The debut poetry collection by the acclaimed writer Suneeta Peres da Costa, author of the Prime Minister’s Literary Award-shortlisted novel Saudade.

In the title poem of Suneeta Peres da Costa’s debut poetry collection, the protagonist wakes to an imprint of tulasī beads marking her cheek where she slept, ‘writing their faint, inscrutable calligraphy’. The poem – recalling Elizabeth Bishop, W.S. Merwin and Derek Walcott – invokes the collection’s landscape of peripatetic and displaced being, traversed by themes of Goan and Indian history, diasporic identity, family and friendship, grief and illness, art and life. The book unravels myths of homecoming and return, belonging and displacement, patrimony and sovereignty; the poems’ speakers feel both at home and also far from home.

Best known for her work as a novelist, Peres da Costa expands upon the range of voices in her fiction, conjuring dramatic personae from Indian history and allegories from suburban Sydney, exploring lyric, narrative and essayistic modes. The collection reflects on artworks and objects: miniature Mughal watercolours and photographs of cockatoos; a tamarillo, a panettone. Passionfruit vines are disentangled; a street cobbler repairs the strap of a bag. Marked by its attention to the body, its strengths and infirmities, Peres da Costa explores in The Prodigal the experience of suffering through earthly and human ecologies and primordial connections.

[A] strong debut poetry collection… Set among gods and Indian temples, the heroes of this collection are on epic journeys of inscape. However, far from being easily archetypal, all is questioned and revisioned through estrangement and signification.
Claire Gaskin, The Saturday Paper

Praise for Saudade:

A lyrical, bold evocation of childhood, enlivened by unforced flourishes of magical realism, that plays intricately on layers of awareness and awakening, on the notion of homecoming, and on complicity in injustice.
Sydney Morning Herald

Peres da Costa weaves sadness and longing through the pages of this piercingly beautiful novella…engaged with the colonial violences, histories of survival, and counter-narratives of the colonised that continue to mark our world today.
Sydney Review of Books

A beautifully conceived story told from the perspective of a young Goan migrant…notable for the gorgeous fluency of its prose style.
Prime Minister’s Literary Award