The Phantom Surrealist

When Christopher Tiffen discovers a painting by little-known Antipodean surrealist Robert J. Wake in the Sydney Art Gallery one summer, he is smitten by both the mysterious artist and the woman by his side viewing the painting, Agnes Alert of Barcelona. Tiffen is struggling with his research, and Robert J. Wake offers him a rich seam.

So begins the intriguing search from Sydney to London and Wake's early days as a surrealist painter; to France and to Barcelona, where he disappears in 1937, and beyond.

Both mesmerising and gently comic, The Phantom Surrealist masterfully captures the ways in which surrealism shook up the staid Australian art world and captured a generation of young radicals. It is a literary novel that seamlessly crosses genres, combining elements of mystery fiction and a love story.

The Phantom Surrealist is a reconstruction of an artist's life in an intriguing and hallucinatory double-narration. With realistic sleuthing and tender evocations of an Australian abroad, Geoffrey Gates seamlessly combines past and present, pseudo-biography and history, in a prose wrought with the smoothness and clarity of a lyric poet. A witty analysis of ambition, desire, invention and rediscovery. Brian Castro

Sassy, smart and endlessly surprising, this part artistic mystery, part playful biography, inserts a little-known Antipodean Surrealist, Robert J. Wake, into the grand narratives of Modernism, art and war. Deliciously funny and remarkably informative, Gates' writing is invigorating and deft. The novel reminds us that truth in fiction, as in life, is always shifting and that Australian artists need to be recognised alongside their European counterparts, despite the tyranny of distance. Molly Murn