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Vertigo, the best website about photo-embedded literature, has published a long and generous appreciation of my new novel Mural. First and foremost, it explains in considerable detail — several hundred words — what the book is about. The narrator’s thesis is that the ‘difference between someone with a benign passion and someone with a violent obsession is razor thin’, Vertigo’s author Terry Pitts writes. Spot on, I’d say. Of Mural’s many reviews, Pitts’s explains my book in the greatest detail. He talks …

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Noted literary critic Peter Craven has named my new novel Mural among his best reads of 2024. In the Weekend Australian of 28 December, he called it a ‘dark and brilliant book’. It rubbed shoulders with Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Until August, Salman Rushdie’s Knife, and Anne Carson’s poetry collection Wrong Norma. I was elated, of course, at having something I’ve written included in such esteemed company.

I’ve been recently contributing pieces to Pearls & Irritations, a terrific independent website that broadcasts the sorts of commentary and reporting that the populist mainstream media refuse to run these days. P&I calls itself an independent public-policy journal.  It was set up by John Menadue AO, the former head of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet who worked for PMs Gough Whitlam and Malcolm Fraser. John was our ambassador to Japan 1977-80, and a former general manager of News …

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