Fiction reviews

After Propinquity was published in the mid-1980s the publisher collapsed, and all the stock sat in the warehouse for months, as orders came in - never to be filled. This forced me to buy the stock and rights. A disaster at the time, but now it has allowed me to release Propinquity as a Kindle e-book, and also put it on Amazon as a "print on demand" paperback.

Back then, however, the main upshot was that I was asked to review fiction - in the Independent, Age, Sydney Morning Herald and Australian.

This exposed me to a range of Austalasian writers. Two gems stand out in my memory: Garry Disher and Maurice Gee. Why, two decades later, are they not world famous?

As for John le Carre, Naguib Mahfouz, John Updike and Larry McMurtry: I should have paid the newspapers for the privilege of reading these guys.

I got into trouble sometimes by being so mean about bad novelists. (Now I'm shocked by how scarifying some of these reviews were.) I was trying to do these authors the favour of dissuading them from wasting their lives in a field in which they had no aptitude. Most didn't appreciate the advice.