num_pages: 192
description: He is a failed writer turned diplomat, an anarchist learning the value of discipline. He moves in a world which takes him from the Australian wilderness to the conference rooms of Vienna and Geneva; from the whore-house to warzone he feels the pull of the genetic spiral of his ancestry. At the sharp axis of his mid-life he scans the memorabilia of his feelings in the hope of giving answers. In his first full-length novel Moorhouse presents a roving, dissatisfied man entering middle age in a house-of-mirrors fragmentary and multifaceted. Sean, a hard-drinking, hard-living Australian, has just turned 40; the other half of the title refers to a precocious schoolgirl who is one of his many liaisons. The most important of the other women who drift into and out of his life include his ex-wife Robyn, now unflinching in the face of cancer; Belle, Sean's fellow sexual adventurer; and Edith Campbell Berry, an aging iconoclast whom Sean encounters in Vienna and Israel. Forty-Seventeen is told with characteristic Moorhouse style — candid, wryly insightful and morbidly comic— and, in this resonant and acclaimed book, achieves a new virtuosity.
language: English
title: Forty-Seventeen
titlecomplete: Forty-Seventeen
genres: Short Stories, Fiction, Australia
ratings_count: 65
awards: awardedAt: 568022400000
name: The Age Book of the Year, awardedAt: 599644800000
name: Australian Literature Society Gold Medal, awardedAt: 599644800000
name: ALS Gold Medal
publisher: Faber and Faber