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

Written with clarity and verve, it not only offers a revealing account of one of Australia’s most significant writers but also of the wider Australian culture that produced him, and us. Lamb brings a rare breadth and depth of cultural analysis to an appreciation not only of Moorhouse’s literary achievements in a golden era of Australian fiction but also the man’s unstinting efforts as an activist in areas such as worker education, censorship, sexual politics and author’s rights. This is an exemplary biography of the writer-in-context.

Amanda Lohrey, The Age, Books of the Year

My book of the year – of many years – is Matthew Lamb’s Strange Paths. It purports to be the first volume of two dedicated to the life and work of Frank Moorhouse. One reviewer, in The Guardian, suggested that this was life writing “that may well reach, even exceed, David Marr’s Patrick White: A Life, which many consider the high-water mark of Australian biography”. But it is even more than this. Lamb has written a cultural history of post-war Australia in these pages. It is a work to put on the shelf beside Donald Horne, Dorothy Green or Bernard Smith – those who sought to treat Australian experience with the seriousness it deserves and yet rarely receives.

Geordie Williamson, The Australian, Books of the Year