I never set out to write in a specific genre or style, it’s more what I feel the story needs or what I feel will enhance whatever I’m trying to do. Unpolished Gem is a moving, vivid journey about identity and the ultimate search for acceptance and healing, delivered by a writer possessed of rare empathy, penetrating insight, and undeniable narrative gifts. “It wasn’t necessary or required for this story. The magical realist element of those earlier books is absent from Limberlost, which is written in a more straightforward style. Read more Print length 282 pages Language English Publisher Plume Publication date JanuDimensions 5.4 x 0. I try and focus on what the emotion is being in a place”. Unpolished Gem is a moving, vivid journey about identity and the ultimate search for acceptance and healing, delivered by a writer possessed of rare empathy, penetrating insight, and undeniable narrative gifts. First published in Australia in 2006, Pung’s wry debut memoir depicts the struggles and successes multiple generations of her family experienced in their migrationmuch of it on footfrom Cambodia’s killing fields through Vietnam and a refugee camp in Thailand to a suburb of Melbourne, where the author was born soon after their. But, he says, it’s not so much how it’s experienced by his characters, “it’s about how it feels. An Australian writer grapples with her Asian heritage. “I worried that this wasn’t going to make sense to some people because I focused on one person, but there seems to be a universality to that experience which has been really humbling.”īut Arnott pointed out that while his grandfather Bruce did spend a summer shooting rabbits to earn money, as always with fiction he had tinkered with the element of reality to suit the demands of drama and story.Īs with his previous novels, The Rain Heron and Flames, Arnott writes evocatively about the natural world. Arnott, who works in an advertising agency in Hobart, said he was touched by how so many readers had related to Limberlost. Pungs first book, Unpolished Gem, won the 2007 Newcomer of the Year Award in the Australian Book Industry Awards.

Unpolished gem book