Elliot Perlman – författare

Eddie is an honest, compassionate man who finds himself, at the age of thirty-eight, with a wife, a child, and three dollars. How did he get that way? He is a university graduate. He married an attractive intelligent woman, his lover from university days. He is a good husband, father and son. At any other time the world would smile on him. But this is the nineties, and the world values other things.Angry, yet full of unexpected humour, Three Dollars chronicles a modern breach in the social contract, and the legacy of Thatcherism and Reaganomics and its effect on people and relationships. It is about a man's attempt to retain his humanity, his family and his sense of humour in grim and pitiless times; about what happens to people in our brave new world of downsizing, outsourcing and privatising.

At once a psychological thriller and a social critique, Seven Types of Ambiguity is a novel of obsessive love in an age of obsessive materialism.Following years of unrequited love, an out-of-work schoolteacher decides to take matters into his own hands, triggering a chain of events no one could have anticipated.This is a story of impulse and paralysis, of empty marriages, lovers and a small boy, gambling and the market, of adult children and their parents, of poetry and prostitution, psychiatry and the law.Published to huge acclaim in the author's native Australia, Seven Types of Ambiguity was hailed as 'a tour de force' (The Age) and described as 'Perlman's achingly humane, richly layered and seamlessly constructed masterpiece' (Canberra Times).

On the crowded streets of New York City there are even more stories than there are people passing each other every day... only some of these stories survive to become history. Lamont Williams, recently released from prison and working as a hospital janitor, strikes up an unlikely friendship with a patient, an elderly Jewish Holocaust survivor who starts to tell him of his extraordinary past. Meanwhile Adam Zignelik, the son of a prominent Jewish civil rights lawyer, is facing a personal crisis: almost 40-years-old, his long-term relationship is faltering and his academic career has stalled. It's only when one of his late father's closest friends, the civil rights activist William McCray, suggests a promising research topic that the possibility of some kind of redemption arises.Dealing with memory, racism and the human capacity for guilt, resilience, heroism, and unexpected kindness, The Street Sweeper spans over fifty years, and ranges from New York to Melbourne, Chicago, Warsaw and Auschwitz, as these two very different paths - Adam's and Lamont's - lead to one greater story.