Nicholas Shakespeare

set on the west coast of Australia, set in Victorian times, a shipwrecked woman who gets caught up with Aboriginal tribes and convicts.

I love the Vivisector.

I love Riders in the Chariots.

I love Tree of Man.

I'm looking at it now on the shelf of my father's study in Portugal.

And I introduced my father to Patrick White.

And every time he comes to stay with us in Tasmania, he reads another Patrick White.

He's now run out.

I'm going to encompass, if I'm allowed with your dispensation, to bring in the Iberian Peninsula to include Spain.

I would like to mention two writers.

First of all, Javier Marías, who I know John Curtis here thinks is one of the great writers currently alive.

I didn't think this until I read Marías' last book, which is called Berta Illa.

B-E-R-T-A-I-S-L-A.

And it's an absolute knockout.

It's set in Oxford and in Madrid at the time of the Falklands Island.

It's a homage to Homer.

There's a kind of Penelope figure who waits for her lover to reappear.

I can't recommend it enough as a contemporary novel.

The other novelist is a Portuguese novelist called Antonio Lobo Antunes, who is still alive.

And he was always...