Forty-Seventeen

What could he tell her now, now that he was forty and she was no longer 17? He is a failed writer turned diplomat, an anarchist learning the value of discipline. He moves in a world which takes him from the Australian wilderness to the conference rooms of Vienna and Geneva; from the whore-house to warzone he feels the pull of the genetic spiral of his ancestry.

At the sharp axis of his mid-life he scans the memorabilia of his feelings in the hope of giving answers. In his first full-length novel, Moorhouse presents a roving, dissatisfied man entering middle age in a house-of-mirrors portrait—fragmentary and multifaceted. Sean, a hard-drinking, hard-living Australian, has just turned 40; the other half of the title refers to a precocious schoolgirl who is one of his many liaisons.

The most important of the other women who drift into and out of his life include his ex-wife Robyn, now unflinching in the face of cancer; Belle, Sean's fellow sexual adventurer; and Edith Campbell Berry, an aging iconoclast whom Sean encounters in Vienna and Israel.

Forty-Seventeen is told with characteristic Moorhouse style—candid, wryly insightful, and morbidly comic.