Cirrus@Austlit

'Exhaustion. and then, after exhaustion, light, creeping in, and with it fear, thought, calculation, that drowning in consciousness. I reach for her, or she me, sometimes violently, hands pulling, digging into flesh, dragging us back. As if that were a precipice, and one of us had nearly fallen.'

'A couple go into a room and will not come out until something—everything—is finished. A man sees in a famous painting something the artist has tried to erase, and which he pursues, like a clue to his own being, from gallery to gallery, story to story. David Brooks's previous books have established him as one of Australia's finest, most challenging writers. The imagination and eroticism of those books are here at new levels. From the haunting encounters of a sea captain in the eighteenth century to a vast Map Room in the twentieth, or the strange encodings in an asylum in the south of France, these are his most polished, elegant, and at times most disturbing stories so far.' (Publication summary)