'Stephen Orr is one of the key fictional chroniclers of South Australian life. While earlier novels such as Miles Franklin short-listed The Hands and One Boy Missing are set in the state’s bare country towns, This Excellent Machine is a homage to growing up in Adelaide’s lower middle class suburbs in the 1980s; a story of fibro, Datsuns, flaky men and enduring women set in Lanark Ave, Gleneagles, a fictional analogue of the suburb of Hillcrest.' (Introduction)