Amanda Lohrey is one of the most significant political novelists of Australia. Lohrey's sensitivity to the limitations of generic writing ensures that her chosen forms--prose fiction and the essay--combine convincing narrative with an acute capacity for social and cultural analysis. Lohrey's fiction emerges from a deep engagement with the social-realist tradition in Australian writing. Over the course of writing four novels, Lohrey's commitment to a political project has necessitated a thorough and intelligent transformation of that tradition, which has enabled not only her own continued development as a writer but ...