THE MAGIC CAFÉ · A NOVEL BY BEALE STAINTON · IBIS PRESS
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Harry Kissinger is thirty years old. He’s part-Maori, alone in the world, and freshly arrived in Sydney with a Kathmandu backpack, a Barry Crump novel, and a private vow to stop drinking. He has just walked sixteen hundred kilometres down the length of New Zealand to clear his head. He has crossed the Tasman to start again.
Then Sydney happens.
The Magic Cafe is a novel about reinvention told from the inside, where the resolution to change keeps colliding with the reality of being human. Set against the pubs and headlands of Sydney’s eastern suburbs, it’s a story about sobriety and its saboteurs, identity carried lightly across borders, and what it means to belong somewhere - or to decide you don’t need to.
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From the novel
Harry had been awake long enough to know that the first hour of a new city tells you almost nothing. The air had a different salt in it. There was a bus sighing at the kerb. He carried his backpack past the café windows and wondered whether a person could arrive somewhere without bringing every old thing along.
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Who it’s for
For readers drawn to tender, clear-eyed stories of second chances, unfamiliar cities, difficult friendships, and the daily work of becoming someone new.
Ibis Press · Literary fiction · 462 pages · ISBN 978-1-7645680-0-5 · Paperback A$32.99 · Published 23 June 2026
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