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A moving and hilarious fish-out-of-water memoir of a millennial leaving his inner-city life to take over the family farm.

‘For any reader desiring to understand contemporary rural Australia,  this entertaining and important book is a must-read ... Refreshingly  honest, acutely observed, witty, lyrical and delightfully ironic, My Father and Other Animals is a pure delight.’ —Charles Massy, author of Call of the Reed Warbler

Sam Vincent is a twenty-something writer in the inner suburbs,  scrabbling to make ends meet, when he gets a call from his mother: his  father has stuck his hand in a woodchipper, but ‘not to worry – it  wasn’t like that scene in Fargo or anything’. When Sam returns to the  family farm to help out, his life takes a new and unexpected direction.

Whether castrating a calf or buying a bull – or knocking in a hundred  fence posts by hand when his dad hides the post-driver – Sam’s farming  apprenticeship is an education in grit and shit. But there are  victories, too: nurturing a fig orchard to bloom; learning to read the  land; joining forces with Indigenous elders to protect a special site.  Slowly, Sam finds himself thinking differently about the farm, about his  father and about his relationship with both.

By turns affecting, hilarious and utterly surprising, this memoir  melds humour and fierce honesty in an unsentimental love letter. It’s  about belonging, humility and regeneration – of land, family and  culture. What passes from father to son on this unruly patch of earth is  more than a livelihood; it is a legacy.

2022 Grattan Institute Prime Minister’s Summer Reading List