AustLit

'By forty you're meant to have the face you deserve. I got the face early. It took me a while to earn it. I believe I am finally there.

'Ray Saint is in trouble. A young woman is dead and he was the last person to see her alive. No one is impressed by his excuses: Ray, you see, is the most hated book reviewer in Australia - a hatchet man with a belly full of bourbon and curdled dreams of literary greatness. Now he will need all of his acid-tongued wit and even some moments of lucidity if he is to discover who murdered the beautiful publishing assistant who got so far beneath his skin.

'As a battered and bloodied Ray investigates more deeply, he is obliged to face the truth: he can't be entirely sure that he isn't the killer.' (Publication summary)

'Last year Jimmy Barnes published Working Class Boy, the opening instalment of a memoir that proved too long, and too thorny, to be contained in a single volume. That first book, which broke off just as Barnes was joining a nascent Adelaide band called Cold Chisel, was astonishing in several ways. It told the story of a childhood that seemed to have been ripped from the most baroquely grim Dickens novel and transplanted to the suburbs of 1960s Australia. And it found a starkly effective language in which to tell that story: a stripped-back prose, full of jagged stops and starts.' (Introduction)

'Ten years ago, Bruce Beresford published a gem of a memoir titled Josh Hartnett Definitely Wants to Do This. Written in diary form, the book chronicled a year or two of Beresford’s life in the trenches of the modern film industry­. Ideally, of course, Beresford’s job is to direct movies. And his CV is thick with garlanded pictures­: Breaker Morant, Driving Miss Daisy, Mao’s Last Dancer. But, as his first book gorily demonstrated, even a filmmaker as successful as he is must spend an ungodly proportion of his time developing projects that go nowhere slowly­.' (Introduction)

'Andrew O’Hagan’s new book is a triptych of long essays about personality in the age of the internet, originally published in the London Review of Books. Two of the three subjects are Australians. The first is Julian Assange, who in 2011 enlisted O’Hagan as the ghostwriter of an ill-fated autobiography. The second is computer scientist Craig Wright, who last year laid claim to being the shadowy Satoshi Nakamoto, inventor of the online currency bitcoin. The third piece is on online identity, something O’Hagan explored by using the name of a young man who died in 1984.' (Introduction)