Reviews

On a promontory in a lake within a city built by the famed architect Walter Burley Griffin and his wife Marion Mahony, rises an elegant glass confection which is home to the best restaurant in the city - The Point. Here, in lamp-lit art deco splendour, comfortable well-heeled patrons like computer engineer Jerome Glancy, come to break bread and feast on the fine food of its chef, Flora, whose 'food is an idea, carefully thought out, before it becomes flesh on a plate'. In a modern city, the pleasures of gastronomy are neither affordable nor of interest to much of the population and the piece of land on which the Point rests approximates as home for a couple of oddly matched vagrants: ex-lawyer Clovis and a young heroin addict, Gwenyth. When a man is brutally murdered, the paths of the 'haves' and the 'have-nots' cross and what looked like difference suddenly seems strangely more familiar.

While it is primarily a novel of ideas, Marion Halligan has expressed them like a true novelist, forcing her readers to feel as well as think.