Eva Sallis

A novel set in Yemen and on a small island off the coast of Australia. At the heart of it is the idea that trying to belong can have something deadly about it and that community is easily lost but almost impossible to gain. Lian, the central character, has an Irish-Australian migrant farmer for a father and a Vietnamese refugee mother. Her childhood is scarred by the damage her mother has sustained and passes on: Lian's principal inheritance is dislocation. In seeking belonging, Lian studies Arabic, her foster mother tongue and travels to Yemen, a foster mother country. In the traditional Islamic culture of the Yemen, Lian moves from a fairly typical outsider's perspective on the people she encounters through an uneasy series of almost friendships all of which are damaged by the inheritance she carries with her. Ultimately she herself disintegrates, stripped of prejudice but also stripped of her cultural self. The City of Sealions is a novel about the nature of cultural belonging and community. What Lian fails to find in the relationships between other mothers and daughters she is driven, in the end to return and find with and for her own.

Part travel story, part fairy story, The City of Sealions is about the nature of language and cultural ambivalence; about mothers and daughters; and about the fragility of self and community.

"The City of Sealions is both beautiful and wise: poetic and haunting, yet with a hard edge of down-to-earth acceptance of the limits of identity." Katherine England

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