An imaginative tour de force, this is the story of Anthea Hunt-from her conception to her sexual awakening.

David Ireland was born in 1927 on a kitchen table in Lakemba in south-western Sydney. He has lived in many places and worked at many jobs, including greenskeeper, factory hand, and for an extended period in an oil refinery, before he became a full-time writer.

Ireland started out writing poetry and drama but then turned to fiction. His first novel, The Chantic Bird, was published in 1968. In the next decade he published five further novels, three of which won the Miles Franklin Award: The Unknown Industrial Prisoner, The Glass Canoe and A Woman of the Future.

David Ireland was made a member of the Order of Australia in 1981. In 1985 he received the Australian Literature Society Gold Medal for his novel Archimedes and the Seagle.

Kate Jennings is a poet, essayist, short-story writer and novelist. Her novels, Snake and Moral Hazard, were New York Times Notable Books of the Year. She has won the Australian Literature Society Gold Medal and the Christina Stead Prize for Fiction. Born in rural New South Wales, she has lived in New York since 1979. Her most recent book is Trouble: Evolution of a Radical.