Legless in Adelaide

Just as Truffaut's Day for Night (1973) is about making movies, this delectable, recursive newie from the author of Elizabeth Costello (2003) and Disgrace (1999) is all about writing fiction.

Reviewers seem to rather dislike the arrival, half way through the story, of the frail but incisive Elizabeth C, eponymous author-heroine and Coetzee surrogate of his previous meandering, thought-provoking tale. But on the face of it, she seems to have just as much of a right to be pottering around the back streets of North Adelaide contemplating aspects of the novel as anyone else.

Buy this book now. Buy all his books. We paid a paltry forty five Australian dollars for the Adelaide-printed Knopf edition at the new Dymocks in World Square, and worth every penny. Or you could pay $39.95 at Gleebooks or $34.95 at Borders in Pitt St. Wandering away from native soil, you could pay A$29.53 for an identical version published by Secker & Warburg at Amazon UK or A$21.96 at Amazon US in a much handsomer rejacketed version from Viking due out on Sep 22.