Frank Moorhouse: Strange Paths

The fruit of years of research, Strange Paths doesn’t just capture the career of a hugely significant Australian writer – it’s a magisterial cultural history of post-war Australia.

Geordie Williamson, The Australian

Lamb somehow allows an intimacy between Moorhouse and the reader while holding his subject at an objective distance. Lamb does justice to an extraordinary life. Writers will relish Moorhouse’s story. For readers who enjoy literary biographies, such as David Marr’s Patrick White: A life.

Becca Whitehead, Books+Publishing

In Lamb’s hands, Moorhouse was someone who would live the creative life no matter what, finding and raising his voice without constraint, all the while exposing the faultlines in Australian society. He enjoyed looking at life from different perspectives and was also a man of action: he wanted change, even if that involved being arrested. Lamb has laid the foundation of a cumulative work that may well reach, even exceed, David Marr’s Patrick White: A Life, which many consider the high-water mark of Australian biography. What Moorhouse would make of that is anyone’s guess, though, at the very least, he’d probably pour himself a martini.

Nigel Featherstone, The Guardian

Strange Paths is as much about changes in Australian print culture and sexual attitudes as it is about Moorhouse’s life. Lamb’s book is not a work of literary criticism but his care in placing Moorhouse’s writing in a detailed historical context is revelatory. It places literary writing at the centre of social change.

Susan Lever, Inside Story

A complex and compelling portrait of the early life of its subject.

judges, The Age Book of the Year, The Age