Let me start with an excerpt.Here he could look at her closely. He began wandering among the many different birthmarks and beauty spots. As for Ellen, her questions seemed to direct him towards her state of dress. For a moment, without looking down, Ellen wasn't sure whether she was being buttone...
Iain Banks' Crow Road begins thus:'It was the day my grandmother exploded.'Why this is a famous opening baffles me. It is vulgar, too brash. It is an opening by a writer that wants the reader to look at him, not the words on the page. It shows off.Murray Bail's short story 'Camouflage' begins thu...
Holden's Performance by award-winning author Murray Bail is the story of Holden Shadbolt, a guileless and matter-of-fact innocent as he passes through the cities and landscape of Australia. His reassuring silent presence and photographic memory make him useful to men of power and women who appear...
Thirteen Australian package tourists set off around the world on the holiday of a lifetime. But as they trawl from country to country, through cities and round ever more obscure museums they find nothing as they expect it, least of all themselves. Homesickness is an enchanting novel: a wry, witty...
& O. queens, a container ship, stacked with the rectangles of various faded colors, which stopped at half a dozen ports along the way. On the ship—it was called the Romance—he imagined there would be silence. Not total silence: of all people, the specialist manufacturer Delage knew there was ...
The country has its faults, as any country does, but lack of hospitality is certainly not one of them. Only when hospitality is little more than an excessive informality, when an entire nation breaks into premature smiling and all-teeth, small-talk mode – which betrays an absence of philosophical...
Working by themselves in rooms filled with other people’s most intimate belongings, piano-tuners give the impression of wanting to be somewhere else. They’re known to jump at unexpected sounds. At the sight of blood they’d run a mile. And yet early in 1943 Eric Banerjee, along with some other abl...
The boy blinked: because he agreed. They knew him well enough to accept the signal, but he scraped his feet like a draught horse, a social-something he had learnt, because he didn't know what to say next. They were standing among the statues in the backyard. The boy had been weeding and trimming ...