Long-listed for the 2006 Miles Franklin Literary Award, this is a striking first novel of contemporary life and manners from award-winning biographer (Rose Boys) and poet, Peter Rose.
The cast
Julia Collis: a brilliant but unconventional publisher, more than a little controlling of her m nage
Candy Collis: an opera singer with a bright future and a dark mother
Matthew Light: a young actor, taken under Julia's wing as a teenage boy, obsessively in love with Roman Anthem
Roman Anthem: the 21-year-old grandson of a legendary Australian prime minister, renowned for his good looks, despised by Julia
The scene
Valhalla: an incestuous household of steely alliances, lopsided infatuations, and dark impulses
The plot
Roman Anthem is missing and no one knows why.
Witty, satirical and full of intrigue, set against a backdrop of opera, publishing and politics, Peter Rose's first novel is unlike any other Australian fiction.
(Source: Allen&Unwin Website)
Roddy Parr
Pymble
:
Fourth Estate
,
2010
Z1703006
2010
single work
novel
'A witty, seductive and moving novel of a famous writer and his protégé Roddy Parr takes us into the luminous circle of a literary giant. It is a world of family intrigues, importunate fans -- and dark secrets. Roddy Parr is an outsider, an ambitious young man who has just completed his PhD on the legendary David Anthem - a writer regularly tipped to win the next Nobel Prize for Literature. Through his friendship with Anthem′s publisher, the dazzling svengali Julia Collis, Roddy joins the Anthem household as David′s secretary. Julia′s not-so-secret agenda is for him to become David′s biographer. Soon Roddy is indispensable, and finds his new status as insider increasingly addictive. Yet Anthem′s world is steeped in tragedy and its truths are not simple ones' (Publisher website).
