Robert Dessaix: 7 books

Witty, acerbic, insightful musings from Robert Dessaix, one of Australia's finest writers. One Sunday night in Sydney, Robert Dessaix collapses in a gutter in Darlinghurst, and is helped to his hotel by a kind young man wearing a T-shirt that says FUCK YOU. What follows are weeks in hospital,...

One Sunday afternoon in a secluded valley in Normandy, Robert Dessaix chanced upon the castle where the 20th-century French writer Andre Gide spent his childhood. Recalling the excitement he felt when he first read Gide as a teenager, Dessaix sets off to recapture what it was that once drew him so strongly...

In today's crazily busy world the importance of making time for leisure is more vital than ever. Yet so many of us lack a talent for it. We are working longer hours, consuming more than ever before; technology erodes the work-life balance further; increasingly, people feel that only work gives existence...

Shortlisted for the Association for the Study of Australian Literature Gold Medal and the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards Highly commended for the FAW Christina Stead Award, the Age Book of the Year and the National Book Council CUB Banjo Awards Adopted as a baby towards the end of World War II,...

For forty years, until the day he died, Ivan Turgenev, one of the greatest novelists of Russia’s Golden Age, was passionately devoted to the diva Pauline Viardot. He followed her and her husband around Europe, even living with them amicably at times as part of their household. Yet as far as we know,...

‘House in Gastouri for rent for 2 mths. Occupant travelling. Reasonable rent.’ In a village on the island of Corfu, alone in the cottage of a man he’s never met, a young Australian actor pieces together the strange life story of the Australian writer whose house he’s living in. As he explores...

Winner of the Australian Literature Society Gold Medal Shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award Every night for twenty nights in a hotel room in Venice, an Australian man recently diagnosed with an incurable disease writes a letter home to a friend. In these letters, against a rich background...