Moreno Giovannoni's latest book, The Immigrants, is a story of love, dreams, exile and tragedy, told with heartbreaking beauty.

In the Victorian town of Mitrefò, tobacco is grown, an Italian cinema and café open, and people travel back and forth from Italy. A boy fishes, wanders the countryside and watches a community form, with its joys, scandals and shared understandings. Interspersed are the ‘grotesques’ – indelible and terrible events that sit alongside the better future they all seek.

In The Immigrants, Moreno Giovannoni depicts a family as they build a new life in a strange land. Through love and exile, industry and tragedy, their unspoken dreams and fears unfold in this astonishing and moving book.

Join us at Croydon Library to hear first-hand from Moreno about his journey to publishing this powerful story.

About the author

Moreno Giovannoni is the author of the critically acclaimed The Fireflies of Autumn and a freelance translator of long standing. His essay 'The Percheron' was published in Southerly and selected for The Best Australian Essays in 2014. He was recipient of the prestigious Deborah Cass Prize in 2016. 

How do we know what’s real? It’s one of those questions that sounds simple until you start pulling at it.

Astrophysicist Geraint F. Lewis takes us through the long, strange history of how humans have tried to answer it. From ancient philosophers to quantum mechanics, and how each answer tends to open up more questions than it closes.

A talk for the curious. 

Free event. All welcome.