'A.S. Patric has been building a reputation with his hard-edged, dream-like fictions that owe as much to European modernism as they do to anything more local and contemporary. His last novel, Black Rock White City, dealing with Yugoslavian émigrés in John Howard's Australia, and the legacy of war in a new country, won the Miles Franklin; his new novel is an ambitious step forward – or back – into history'. (Introduction)