Sylvia Lawson is a distinguished cultural critic and essayist. Her award-winning The Archibald Paradox: A Strange Case of Authorship was published in 1983, and her collection of essays, How Simone de Beauvoir Died in Australia, won the 2003 Gleebooks Prize for literary and cultural criticism. In selecting the latter volume among my best books of 2002 for the Sydney Morning Herald, I claimed that it was characterised by ‘complex, spacious, committed, convincing, intellectually riveting speculations and reflections’. Many of these qualities may be found in The Outside Story.

This is Sylvia Lawson’s first published novel, and only the second novel that Hardie Grant Books has published. The publishers found it ‘too hard to refuse. We think that this richly textured book offers much emotional and intellectual satisfaction.’ So there is much invested, both emotionally and intellectually, in this book. I trust it is neither ungracious nor ungentlemanly of me to point out that, at seventy-one, Sylvia Lawson is a contender for the First Novel by a Senior Award.