[nice tight unread copy, no discernible wear; jacket shows just a trace of surface wear and a teensy-tiny bit of wrinkling at bottom edge of rear panel (many would call it Fine, but I'm a bit Finicky)]. In this "audacious novel," Sarah Wode-Douglass, editor of a London poetry magazine accompanies a famous (and infamous) novelist to Kuala Lumpur, where they encounter a destitute Australian who had perpetrated a ruinous literary hoax decades earlier. The Australian's account of his own literary folly -- "marked by kidnapping, exile, and death -- a relentless saga that reaches from Melbourne to Bali, Sumatra, and Java" -- draws Sarah into his world, as she imagines the glory that could be hers if she's able to coax from him a manuscript that she's convinced is a work of genius. Unless, of course, he's just a raving lunatic -- as her writer-companion insists.