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  • Published: 26 October 2011
  • ISBN: 9781742746647
  • Imprint: Random House Australia
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 192

Tales of Mystery and Romance




Travel, sex, death and love - a most surprising collection of stories.

Travel, sex, death and love - a most surprising collection of stories.

'I love airports. I love the opera of airports . . . Families with high-gloss airport emotion, a linkage of smiles, tears and touching. A moratorium on malice, air-conditioned goodwill. When the airport sanctuary is left, the automatic doors open into the sweaty heat and blown litter, and they also re-open the wounds of the family and the dust blows into the lacerations.'

In an odyssey which moves across a world stage, Tales of Mystery and Romance touches high comedy and low farce - the non-event of the Jack Kerouac Wake, the dispute over the exact form of secular penetration achieved by Milton, an argument with an ex-wife over 'motel sex' - and much tender and perceptive observation. You will come away from this book at least knowing something about belly dancers, the intricacies of homosexual sex, and even life after death.

  • Published: 26 October 2011
  • ISBN: 9781742746647
  • Imprint: Random House Australia
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 192

About the author

Frank Moorhouse

Frank Moorhouse was born in the coastal town of Nowra, NSW. He worked as an editor of small-town newspapers and as an administrator and in 1970s became a full-time writer. He won national prizes for his fiction, non-fiction, and essays. He was best known for the highly acclaimed Edith trilogy, Grand Days, Dark Palace, and Cold Light, novels which follow the career of an Australian woman in the League of Nations in the 1920s and 1930s through to the International Atomic Energy Agency in the 1970s as she struggled to become a diplomat. His last book The Drover’s Wifea reading adventure published in October 2017, brings together works inspired by Henry Lawson’s story and examines the attachment Australia has to the story and to Russell Drysdale’s painting of the same name. Frank was awarded a number of fellowships including writer in residence at King’s College Cambridge, a Fulbright Fellowship, and a fellowship at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington. His work has been translated into several languages. He was made a member of the Order of Australia for services to literature in 1985 and was made a Doctor of the University by Griffith University in 1997 and a Doctor of Letters (honoris causa) by the University of Sydney, 2015. Frank Moorhouse died, in Sydney, on 26 June 2022.

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Praise for Tales of Mystery and Romance

[Moorhouse] deals with the emotional minefield of the "free" life with sensitivity, using irony and humour to stave off sentimentalism.

Anne Summers, The Advertiser

Tales of Mystery and Romance is incredibly daring, both in content and style . . . voluptuous and shrewd ideas and writing.

Kirsten Blanch, Cleo

I find it difficult to convey the real magic quality of the style; [Moorhouse] is often elliptical, there are nuances of Kurt Vonnegut Jnr, a sense of irony but also a happy acceptance of life in its confusions and comic despair.

Colin Spencer