Losing Face

By: George Haddad

Narrated by: Elias Anton, Nicole Nabout

From award-winning author George Haddad comes a stunning, thought-provoking story about facing up to your family and your future. Losing Face deals with timely issues around consent and inherited trauma.

Joey is young, indifferent. He’s drifting around Western Sydney, unaware of how his passivity might lead him even further adrift, off the rails, into a violent crime.

Meanwhile his grandmother, Elaine—a proud Lebanese woman—tries to save face and hold herself together in the wake of Joey's actions. In her family, history repeats itself, vices come and go and uncovering long-buried secrets isn't always cathartic.

This gripping and hard-hitting story reveals the richness and complexity of contemporary Australian life and tests the idea that facing consequences will make us better people.

2023, Miles Franklin Literary Award, Long-listed

2023, Small Press Network Book of the Year Award, Short-listed

2023, Prime Minister's Literary Awards, Short-listed

©2022 George Haddad (P)2022 Bolinda Publishing Pty Ltd

Critic reviews

"At a time when we need narratives that require more of us than comfort George Haddad's writing delivers. His is a refreshing and challenging voice. Haddad is the remarkable storyteller I have been waiting for."(Tony Birch, best-selling author of The White Girl)

"It’s tough, and it’s powerful, but it is also joyful and, ultimately, hopeful." (Tegan Bennett Daylight, author of Safety and Bombora)

"This novel is wide in scope, rich in the sharp telling details of everyday life, and Haddad is superb at evoking characters who are both unique and relatable in all their complex, layered humanness. Losing Face is a deeply affecting portrait of one family’s engagement with the moral complexities of contemporary Australia." (Felicity Castagna, author of The Incredible Here and Now)