'Australians are quick to claim as their own anyone with an Australian connection who achieves international fame, but the novelist Michel Faber so far appears to have slipped the net of our national pride. Born in the Netherlands in 1960, he came to Australia with his parents in 1967 and spent the formative years of his life in Melbourne, graduating in Arts from Melbourne University in 1980. By 1993 he had settled in Scotland, where his first collection of short fiction was published five years later, so he is officially known as a Dutch-born Scottish writer. Such is the transnational culture we live in.' (Introduction)