Robert Drewe – författare

Big, bullish Dick Cullen, light sleeper, former rugby star and present expert on water buffalo, is lumbering through his tour of duty with a UN agency in Asia. Totally out of his depth among his small, deft, knowing colleagues, he lurches sweatily from bar to bar across various tropical states of emergency. Only in the Nameless Nightclub does he realise it is just a matter of time before his nightmares become reality . . .

''These stories breathe. Taut yet teeming with life, they are shot through with gritty phrases that catch at one''s throat.'' - Sydney Morning HeraldSet among the surf and sandhills of the Australian beach - and the tidal changes of three generations of the Lang family - this bestselling collection of short stories is an Australian classic. The Bodysurfers vividly evokes the beach, with the scent of the suntan oil, the sting of the sun and a lazy sensuality, all the while hinting at a deep undercurrent of suburban malaise. From first publication, these poignant and seductive stories marked a major change in Australian literature.

In the warm alkaline waters of the public bath a headstrong young engineer accidentally collides with a beautiful actress. From this innocent collision of flesh begins a passion that takes them from the Wiltshire Downs to the most elemental choices of life and death in the Australian desert. Their intense romance is but part of the daring story that unfolds. Mingling history, myth and technology with a modern cinematic and poetic imagination, Robert Drewe presents a fable of European ambitions in an alien landscape, and a magnificently sustained metaphor of water as the life-and-death force.

A tale of passion and pursuit, Fortune is the story of Don Spargo, a modern explorer who finds a sunken treasure ship off the West Australian coast and becomes a folk hero, a lover, and a hunted and haunted man. Suspenseful, satirical and deeply moving, this novel challenges the nature of reality and legend in those scenes of modern conflict – from the media to art, from politics to crime – that have obsessed the Western individual since World War II.

Witty and seductive, inventive and disturbing, The Bay of Contented Men ranges in location from east to west coast Australia, to the United States, Japan, and Hong Kong. This is the neighbourhood of edgy suburbanite Australians whose desires and misadventures are conjured here into intriguing fictions. Robert Drewe''s characters face the confrontation of gender, race and generation with an ironic desperation born of love, lust and wistful memory.