Maestro

Against the backdrop of Darwin, that small, tropical hothouse of a port, half-outback, half-oriental, lying at the tip of northern Australia, a young and newly arrived southerner encounters the maestro, a Viennese refugee with a shadowed past. The occasion is a piano lesson, the first of many.

"I enjoyed Maestro enormously. Besides its thoughtfulness and bright sensuality, it has a playful quality, a love of jest, which appealed to me very much." - Helen Garner, Sydney Review

On release, Maestro was hailed as "a splendid achievement, a wise, deeply felt novel that continues to haunt well after one has finished it. It is distinguished by subtlety, by economy and by a quality often lacking in even the best of recent novels - an unerring quality of tone", according to Andrew Riemer in the Sydney Morning Herald.

It has sold over 200,000 copies in Australia and was voted by members of the Australian Society of Authors as one of the top 40 Australian Books of All Time.

"The necessary elusiveness of perfection, the unplumbed ocean beneath articulateness, the ambivalence of beauty - these are the revolving concerns of Peter Goldsworthy, and handled not just with irony, but with an effervescent, compassionate wit. He can't help being funny, but he's wise too." - Australian Book Review