Cirrus@Austlit

'The charismatic god-king Sukarno has brought Indonesia to the edge of chaos - to an abortive revolution that will leave half a million dead. For the Western correspondents here, this gathering apocalypse is their story and their drug, while the sufferings of the Indonesian people are scarcely real: a shadow play. Working at the eye of the storm are television correspondent Guy Hamilton and his eccentric cameraman Billy Kwan. In Kwan's secret fantasy life, both Sukarno and Hamilton are heroes. But his heroes betray him, and Billy is driven to desperate action. As the Indonesian shadow play erupts into terrible reality, a complex personal tragedy of love, obsession and betrayal comes to its climax.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'Francis Cullen, growing up in the island of Tasmania, is outwardly a very ordinary boy. But his inner life is dominated by dreams of a place he calls the Otherland: a transfigured world beyond the real one. In childhood, he glimpses it in the landscapes of his native island; and when he falls in love with a country girl, the dream is central to his feelings for her. After Heather is lost to him, Francis comes more and more under the influence of Lewie Matthews - a youth whose ambition is to become a criminal. Now the Otherland's location is seen as the mainland of Australia, where a mythical life of wildness and crime beckons. Francis, Lewie and their friends pursue this life in Melbourne - until a climax of destruction shatters the dream.'

Source: Publisher's blurb (HarperCollins 2013 ed.)