Dimensions
130 x 198 x 14mm
Memories and Reflections.
A fascinating insight into a major Australian novelist's development, this collection of pieces employs the memoir as a springboard, presenting us with reflections on literature and an analysis of Australia's changing place in the world over the author's lifetime - a lifetime stretching from the British Empire of his childhood to the post-colonial present.
'Crossing The Gap', the title piece of the collection, has a particular topical interest, dealing as it does with the shift from Empire to a new Asia-Pacific consciousness.
Koch's recollections take us through several continents and an unusual range of topics, from his native island of Tasmania to London in the 1950s; from newly-independent India to Sukarno's Indonesia; from california in the 1960s, with Ken Kesey and Larry McMurtry, to the China of Chairman Mao in the 1980s. It is a rich and exciting mixture, charting a novelist's growth and the influences which have shaped him.