Cirrus@Austlit

'In this era of soaring house prices and desperate first-home buyers, it’s very brave or very silly to centre a contemporary Australian novel on the concept of property ownership. Puzzlingly, the newly married couple of Ashley Hay’s A Hundred Small Lessons purchase a large piece of riverside real estate without so much as mentioning the huge mortgage they have presumably signed up for. The sense of wonder increases when you learn that one of them does not work, and the other — scarcely less precariously — is a newspaper journalist.' (Introduction)