AustLit

'That there was an outside world of prostitutes and sex was brought to me mainly I suppose by people like Alastair. Ali and the other boarders had this air of sophistication – un-provincial I would call it now, but then there was no other world but the provincial to envisage. Ali told stories of an existence different from mine, but it never amounted to a whole way of life I could ever have imagined myself in. I didn’t doubt that existence, I could picture it, with Ali’s information, vividly. But it was a world I couldn’t see myself walking through. It was Ali’s world peopled by characters and mapped by landmarks with which he was wholly familiar and which I had never encountered and which I felt I never would.'  (Introduction)