AustLit

'About a third of the way through This Excellent Machine, its teenage protagonist, Clem, finds himself in a cafe on the wrong side of town. This is a place where the footpaths are black, because “they’d waited too long to hose down the vomit”. Where anonymous doors lead to underground tattoo parlours and where hand-scrawled signs advertise “massage by the ½ hour”.' (Introduction)