Alien Son
Condition: SECONDHAND
This is a secondhand book. The jacket image is a photograph of the exact copy we have in stock. This image shows the condition of this book. Further condition remarks are below.
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: No dust jacket
Pages: Good
Condition remarks: Condition as shown in image
To grow up is to navigate a world that was never built for you — and for the young narrator of Alien Son, that truth cuts with quiet, relentless precision. Judah Waten's celebrated semi-autobiographical collection of linked stories chronicles the coming-of-age of a Jewish immigrant boy in early twentieth-century Australia, mapping the tender and turbulent terrain between two cultures, two languages, and two irreconcilable versions of belonging. Set against the backdrop of a young nation still defining its own identity, the work presents a family striving to plant roots in foreign soil while the pull of the old world never fully releases its grip. Waten, one of the pioneering figures of Australian Jewish literature, writes with a spare, unsentimental clarity that transforms the intimate details of domestic life into a profound meditation on displacement, identity, and the cost of assimilation. Alien Son, first published in 1952, is widely regarded as a landmark in Australian multicultural literature, anticipating by decades the national conversation about migration and belonging. Each vignette illuminates the gap between parents and children, the old world and the new, with a restraint that makes its emotional undercurrents all the more powerful — leaving the reader to wonder what, if anything, is ever truly left behind.
Author: Judah Waten
Format: Paperback
Genre: Australian history
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: No dust jacket
Pages: Good
Condition remarks: Condition as shown in image
To grow up is to navigate a world that was never built for you — and for the young narrator of Alien Son, that truth cuts with quiet, relentless precision. Judah Waten's celebrated semi-autobiographical collection of linked stories chronicles the coming-of-age of a Jewish immigrant boy in early twentieth-century Australia, mapping the tender and turbulent terrain between two cultures, two languages, and two irreconcilable versions of belonging. Set against the backdrop of a young nation still defining its own identity, the work presents a family striving to plant roots in foreign soil while the pull of the old world never fully releases its grip. Waten, one of the pioneering figures of Australian Jewish literature, writes with a spare, unsentimental clarity that transforms the intimate details of domestic life into a profound meditation on displacement, identity, and the cost of assimilation. Alien Son, first published in 1952, is widely regarded as a landmark in Australian multicultural literature, anticipating by decades the national conversation about migration and belonging. Each vignette illuminates the gap between parents and children, the old world and the new, with a restraint that makes its emotional undercurrents all the more powerful — leaving the reader to wonder what, if anything, is ever truly left behind.