My Name Is Revenge: A Novella and Collected Essays

(Paperback)

Publishing Details

Classifications

Physical Properties

Description

*Longlisted for the 2020 Davitt Awards: Adult Crime*

On 17 December 1980, at 9:47 am, two men shot the Turkish consul-general to Sydney and his bodyguard near the consul's home in Vaucluse. The assassins aimed, fired, and vanished.

A finalist in the 2018 Carmel Bird Digital Literary Award,My Name Is Revengeis a novella set in 1980s Sydney and based on true events.

From the assassination in Australia, one of a series of international terrorist attacks, the story traces back to the streets of 1920s Berlin and the Armenian genocide of World War I. Three companion essays provide historical context.

'Informed by a passion to express the haunting of almost unimaginable historical crimes, and the tragic shapes that vengeance for those crimes can take...Kalagian Blunt expertly and compassionately examines the nature of truth and its representation via the conjunction of fiction and essay.' Carmel Bird, Patrick White Literary Award winner

'Ashley Kalagian Blunt weaves a mostly-forgotten strand of our history into a compelling contemporary crime story.My Name Is Revengemanages to be both unflinching in its depiction of inherited hatreds and compassionate about the experience of living with the terrible aftermath of a genocide that the world has largely ignored.' Emily Maguire, author of An Isolated Incident

'A heartfelt and gripping story of family, hardship and resilience.' Candice Fox

Reviews

Against a backdrop of eucalypts and thrumming cicadas, Kalagian Blunt deftly sketches her portrait of a family reckoning with its past. In her interweaving of Australian and Armenian histories, Kalagian Blunt illustrates and animates just how intricately linked her forebears' past is with Australia's own. Dealing imaginatively with questions of radicalisation, displacement, and assimilation, this story feels very pertinent to our current political climate, and makes for a gripping read.

- Adele Dumont, author of No Man Is an Island

... A moving and informative piece of writing. Its history lesson is worthwhile, but even more so is its exploration of family, community and outsiders. It's about the way that denial doesn't solve a thing in life, and acknowledgement of the past is the very least that we owe our forebears.

- Karen Chisholm, Newtown Review of Books