A hilarious tale of a lustful teenager in 1950s Melbourne, has been considered an outlier in Murnane’s fiction. That is because, as Murnane writes in his foreword, it is ‘only half a book and Adrian Sherd only half a character’. Here, at last, is young Adrian’s journey in full, from fantasies about orgies with American film stars and idealized visions of suburban marital bliss to his struggles as a Catholic student-priest, and finally a burgeoning sense of the boundless imaginative possibilities to be found in literature and landscape.