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Book synopsis

Offcuts is an intimate and beautifully observed collection of short prose pieces by Patrick Hartigan, a Sydney-based painter whose visual sensibility permeates every sentence. Published by Gazebo Books in 2019, the collection gathers over thirty brief narratives - some spanning only a page - that illuminate the extraordinary in the overlooked corners of daily existence.

The pieces move fluidly between continents and moods: a son scatters his father's ashes at a Waldorf school; an artist hangs nudes in a gallery that doesn't entirely welcome them; a man restores a cracked fireplace tile with the patience he can't locate in his painting studio; a grandfather's frail voice brightens over the phone with a joke about a dead woman's usefulness in heaven. Throughout, Hartigan attends to objects - a clock radio on a nature strip, a father's old wallet, a coloured ball returning over a fence - with the care of someone who knows that things hold lives inside them.

Written in spare, precise prose, Offcuts is a meditation on grief, time, art-making, and the strange richness of paying close attention. It is a debut of uncommon maturity and quiet originality.

Book details

• Full title: Offcuts
• Author: Patrick Hartigan
• Language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 146
• EAN: 9781764520379
• ISBN: 1764520378
• ID: 52488774
• Publisher: Gazebo Books
• Weight: 200 g
• Dimensions: 198 × 129 × 10 mm
• Date of publishing: 01. June 2026

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