> Skip to content
  • Published: 24 July 2013
  • ISBN: 9781743483190
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 360

A Cafe in Venice



Quirky and neurotic, Gordon B. Shoesmith is a 30-something jazz musician seeing his twelfth psychiatrist in as many years. He increasingly discovers that there is a conflict between his artist's idealism and the hard reality of life.

Fueled by his ambitious journalist girlfriend, Jenny, and her disapproving parents, Gordon finds himself on an improvised, medicated roller-coaster ride of self-discovery that drags him from cockroach-infested, inner-city anonymity to mercurial artistic success, to the cynical world of advertising. He's finally tossed onto the road that leads to a cafe, run by Joe, a middle-aged, Palestinian Elvis impersonator, in the desert town of Venice, South Australia.
A Cafe in Venice is a surreal, comic insight into the personal fulfilment we aspire to a mad, intransigent world.

  • Published: 24 July 2013
  • ISBN: 9781743483190
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 360

About the author

Dorian Mode

Dorian Mode was born in 1966, the day Arthur W. Falstaf revolutionised the culinary world by inventing the fork-and-spoon-in-one, known as the 'Spork'. He has written features for publications ranging from Sydney Morning Herald to Inside Sport. He is a jazz musician and author of the comic novel A Cafe in Venice, and the memoir The Mozart Maulers.

Also by Dorian Mode

See all