Shanghai Dancing by Brian Castro

A "fictional autobiography," Shanghai Dancing is a dazzling meditation on identity, language and disorientation that combines photographs and written images in the style of W.G. Sebald. The Age has described the book as "an extraordinary polyglot mix of sources: Portuguese, Chinese, English, Jewish and Catholic, and a mysterious recessive black gene... told in Castro's characteristically baroque prose, dense with its passion for language and serious wordplay." The winner of some of Australia's top literary prizes, Shanghai Dancing has been praised by its judges as "a work of major significance [that] challenges our expectations of storytelling...