Cirrus@Austlit

'Nicholas Hasluck has been a significant and engaging novelist on the Australian literary scene for half a century now. His achievements, from Quarantine and The Bellarmine Jug to Dismissal and The Bradshaw Case are well attested. His books are not only a good read, but they have something to say. In part this is the result of his having led a double life. He has not only been a prolific writer, author of some thirty volumes of fiction, poetry and essays, but he has also worked for his living. He has encountered the real world. He has not lived on a succession of government grants and hand-outs, on that treacherous largesse that has insulated so many litterateurs from normative human experience and left them with little to write about.'  (Introduction)

'Co-written with Ian McFadyen, of Comedy Company fame, The Lowest Depths is Professor Ross Fitzgerald’s forty-third book and the eighth in his Grafton Everest series. It follows the The Dizzying Heights (2019), also co-written with McFadyen. It is unprecedented in Australia, and perhaps in the English-speaking world, for eight political satires to be written chronologically, following the development of the same set of key characters. The closest I can think of are P.G. Wodehouse’s comic novels about the bumbling Bertie Wooster and his hugely intelligent manservant, Jeeves. But they do not develop, and Wodehouse has a stationary sense of time.' 

 (Introduction)