Meet the Budd-Doyles: a suburban family in shambles, and about to unravel further as Helen Budd-Doyle in one fell swoop destroys her bed, abandons the family home, and buys a second-hand bookshop form a man in a pub – leaving her bewildered junk-collecting husband Arnold to sort out his life. But he can't. Enter Gabriel, one of their sons, wreaking havoc as he pushes his father to sell off the accrued junk of a lifetime. Add a little sibling rivalry with his brother Vivian fresh home and licking his wounds from a life in far north . . . and watch the fireworks on Jacaranda Street.
The Bookshop on Jacaranda Street is a brilliant black comedy by a unique new Australia voice, its world peopled by an extensive cast of misfits - eccentrics, innocents, cranks and pariahs - and driven by an inexorable urge to make order out of chaos.
If only life was like a book . . . in that everything made sense and you know all will be resolved in the end. If only life was like a book so that, if you decided you didn't like it, you could take it back and get another one.
