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For years, four very different men have met for lunch each Thursday to share their mutual obsession - the telling of stories. Each man takes pride in his ability to entertain the others, while revealing nothing of himself. All agree that Ramon, the blink Argentinian, is the master storyteller among them.
Now, once again, it is Ramon's turn to tell a tale. His friends settle back, ready to be entertained. Ramon's story transports them from the bloody political upheavals of Argentina in the seventies, to a tea plantation on the beautiful island of Java, before finally bringing them back to present-day Sydney.
It is the story of a man and a woman, the precious gift the man gives the woman and the consequences of that gift. Ramon swears every word of it is true. Yet the story has dark, sinister undertones.
His audience grows increasingly uneasy as the parallels between the deeply flawed hero of the tale and Ramon himself become ever more apparent.
As Ramon's story reaches its climax, his listeners must face the unbearable fact that this man they have grown to love may, in fact, be a monster.
RRP: $19.95
| Availability: | Available at our supplier, usually ships in 10 to 14 days.
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| ISBN 13: | 9780732275426 |
| ISBN 10: | 0732275423 |
| Binding: | Paperback |
| Pages: | 480 |
| Dimensions: | 178 x 111 mm |
| Released: | 01/08/2003 |
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Way, way back in the early sixties, in my penultimate year of schooling I had my first story published in The Albertian, the school's annual magazine. I seemed to grow a couple of inches taller overnight and expected to be recognised wherever I went. It didn't happen. Even so, I wanted to be a writer when I left school. That didn't happen either. There was no demand then for authors who still didn't really need to shave and who had nothing to write about anyway I discovered advertising and it discovered me. The talent I had that saw me rejected as a novelist and, incidentally, as a journalist, seemed tailor made for a high-flying career as a copywriter. People in the industry liked my little jokes and wordplays and asked me to attach them to spreadable butters, soap powders, cooking foil and automobiles. Early successes saw me pack up my bags and take my pen to England where I joined J Walter Thompson. The second TV commercial I wrote for them won one of Britain's top awards. I moved to Australia and more successes followed. I forgot all about writing novels for the next twenty-five years until Bryce Courtenay wrote The Power of One.
Hell, there was nothing special about Bryce. He was just an advertising man like me and, worse, older. But he did it. He wrote a bestseller and broke the golden handcuffs that kept him chained to advertising. Jealousy is a powerful motivator. There's nothing like jealousy to snap a person out of their complacency. As it happened an American company was very keen to buy the advertising agency my two partners and I owned. They wanted to give us a lot of money and, at the conclusion of a three-year service contract, the opportunity to escape.
In August 1991, six weeks after gaining my freedom I began my new career as a novelist. Looking back over the past eight years it is hard to believe how dumb I've been. If you're toying with idea of becoming a novelist and you're looking for a role model, look elsewhere.There are mitigating circumstances. Bryce was an instant success and my first novel was fought over by two publishing companies and sold widely in Europe. Yet the advertising man in me kept telling me what I had to do in my new career in order to succeed. And I kept on not listening.
First off, I should have changed sex along with careers. Yes, I should have become a woman. Four out of five books are bought by women. Nine out of ten commissioning editors are women. Nineteen out of twenty editors are women. Nineteen out of twenty publicists are women. Nineteen out of twenty magazines that publish book reviews are for women. Nineteen out of twenty literary editors are stop me if I'm getting boring also women.
Clearly, if you want to be published, reviewed, bought and read by millions being female has to be the logical way to go. Oh, and if I was going to have the collagen in the lips, the silicone in the breasts and the dangly bits lopped off it was kind of mandatory to have the hair implant, the face lift and whatever else it is you do if you want to look young.
That was the second thing I needed to do. Become young again. Young is new and exciting and, strangely, middle-age isn't. I was still a middle-aged bloke when Lunch with Mussolini was published. Technically this is far and away the best book I have written. In his review in The Canberra Times, Professor Stephen Prickett even suggested it was a candidate for the Booker Prize. God bless him. Alas, while selling well and still generating more mail than any other of my books, Lunch with Mussolini did not live up to the high hopes held for it.
It had to be the age-sex thing. Had to be.
Sole Survivor followed. It was a major departure from my two previous novels and carried with it all my hopes for achieving a Bryce Courtenay level of success. It didn't happen. Local publishers were luke warm about a story located on a remote part of an island off the coast of New Zealand with an environmental backdrop. I tried sending the manuscript to a couple of US publishers. They liked Sole Survivor a whole lot more than the locals but still not enough to publish. HarperCollins Australia finally agreed to publish and duly did without any great expectations. Sales tended to live up to HarperCollins' expectations rather than mine.
I thought again about the collagen and the silicone but couldn't figure out how to explain the decision to my wife and kids. Besides, I like being a bloke. In September 1997 I decided that if success wasn't going to come to me, at the level I wanted it to, then I had to go to it. I packed up one suitcase with books and another with clothes and flew to LA. I sat in my hotel room at Santa Monica and started ringing agents. It's a funny thing, when I rang the same people from Australia I could never get through. I could have been calling from Mars. Ringing from Santa Monica I got through to everyone I asked for straight away. People were polite, some even interested, most promised to take my books and get back to me. None did. Not for a while anyway.
I went on to New York but no one rang. Up to Vermont and down to New Orleans. No one rang. I went across to Santa Fe. The phone rang. I automatically assumed it was a wrong number.
"Hi Derek?" said Jillian Manus, ace west coast literary agent and top hit on my hit list of agents.
"Oh hi," I said, as casually as anyone can who is experiencing chest constriction consistent with a reasonably major heart attack.
"Derek," she said. "When you wrote Sole Survivor you must have realised that you'd written a major movie."
My life changed just like that.
Eight weeks later Jillian had sold the film rights to hot Hollywood producer team, Kennedy/Marshall through Disney Studios. She sold the North American book rights to Simon & Schuster and I found myself in the flattering
position of having the company president Michael Korda no less edit my book. Sole Survivor is one of their featured spring releases. HarperCollins UK followed. Sole Survivor is now in its eighth edition in Australia, which also makes HarperCollins Australia very happy.
I have since completed and published my fourth novel, Blockade, which has been released in Australia only. At this point I really don't know what is going to happen next. Maybe the film will be bigger than Ben Hur. Maybe the book will take off in America and rest of the world. Who knows what my future holds? The only thing I really know for sure is that collagen and silicone will play no part in it.
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