Despite a steady religious faith, success as a commercial artist, a beloved daughter and a marriage “dense with love”, this sudden devastating loss becomes “the defining event” of Ives’ life.
Though essentially introspective, Ives is liberal through and through. The reward for Hijuelos’ daring is a painfully affecting novel about the agonies of forgiveness. Her next book, a novel entitled ‘Desert Places’, will be published in May by Viking.. THE Devil, famously, has all the best tunes, so it is always an ambitious undertaking to build a novel around the actions of an ordinary, “good” man. But it is magical too, reminding us that the ordinary is profoundly strange.”When Chatterton took arsenic in London in 1770,” Keneally tells us, “Wordsworth called him ‘the Marvellous Boy’ … I too wanted to be a marvellous boy without having to take arsenic.” Well, as it turned out, he was.! Robyn Davidson is the author of ‘Tracks’. Despite the lightness of touch and the gentle humour, it’s a rather sad little book, a book about people making the best of not very much.

Bernadette’s decision to take the veil is poignant not because her hand would be “unheld for eternity” but because her options were so few. His evocation of suburban life in the Fifties is enough to put a chill down the spine of any escapee. (Aborigines lay too far beyond the Pale to constitute Otherness.)Most people reading this book will have to make an imaginative leap back to lost time, but an Australian of my generation will be hauled back willy- nilly. Brother Dinny who tells his charges that “girls aren’t interested in human lust – they go along with the desires of males only out of generosity”.

There were the Campbell’s Raiders, a mob of Protestant guerrillas who tried to turn doubting Catholics to their cause. One forgets that before immigration gave white Australians something to define themselves against, the widest social chasm lay between Protestants and Catholics. The Christian Brothers who taught him; the school chums; the somehow faceless but oh-so-present Frawley and Curran girls with their blue school uniforms and bare arms, and especially his parents, to whom the book is dedicated.There was Brother Digger Crichton who swore he had seen the Red Baron shot down by Aussies in World War One. Brother Buster Clare who looked like a cop and liked to gamble on what would be set for the state exams – “I tipped twelve questions from the last leaving Cert, mavourneen.