The Ancestor Game

The Ancestor Game, winner of Australia's top literary prize, is like an elaborate house of many floors and wings and hidden rooms, all interconnecting in unlikely and surprising ways, and inhabited by a richly divergent family of characters. Alex Miller skillfully poses perhaps unanswerable but infinitely intriguing questions about exile and belonging, identity and cultural past, art and history. In this novel, the lives, pasts, and the imaginations of the three central characters, Steven Muir, Lang Tzu, and Gertrude Spiess are powerfully and poetically interwoven. As the riveting history of each unfolds, the reader is drawn into an intricate, often mysterious series of paths traversing centuries and continents. Steven, Lang, and Gertrude find that their internal homelands, their personal landscapes of enchantment, change profoundly as they examine and recreate their family histories.