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)