Mireille Juchau

It's a floating world.

And I guessed that the first of the two locations was Germany and Portugal.

I thought there was two European cities.

And there was a soccer player mentioned, a Portuguese soccer player, I've forgotten his name.

Oh, was there?

Yes, yeah, that's right.

I love that scene at the dinner, at the writer's dinner, where they're served a dish which could be roughly translated as the parts no one would eat otherwise.

That just seemed to me sort of somehow emblematic of the book as well.

Yes, I agree.

Yes.

Absolutely.

And that's the beauty of this book is that that idiosyncratic, freewheeling, lively style is evident on every page and it has not been smoothed out or anglicised, if you like, by an editor.

And I think that is just the absolute beauty of this book, as well as the depth of the ideas and thinking and the immense amount of research and research

background reporting that she's done on the various five chapters, which range from such topics as suicide, criminal injustice, friendship, migration, being a childhood survivor of the Holocaust, being someone who accompanies petty criminals to court.

So she brings her extraordinary thinking and her outsider's

perspective on Australian culture to those topics and produces something really unique.

Absolutely.

Yes, she's got a huge body of literary references and historical references.

And you can see her background as a cultural historian coming through in a lot of the work.

One of her touchstones is the work of Raymond Gator.