AustLit

'When the tourist ship Malekula arrives at a tropic island in the the Pacific the crushing heat and the looming hurricane intensify the hostilities and frustrations of the egocentric people on board. And when the hurricane bursts on the island the havoc it brings is less perhaps than the personal storms of man and wife, of spinster friends, of man and mistress, of erring priest.

'Gerald Seabrook's pointless womanising achieves a finality of irritation for his suffering wife; elderly Miss Paradise drives her life-long friend, Miss Trumper, to make a fatal pilgrimage; the agent Stevenson sees the failure of his dream of love with his mistress; and the priest, Father Lake, explodes his own petty vices and his spiritual impotence. Their moments of truth are brilliantly illuminated as the story moves to its climax in the hurricane and its aftermath.'

Source: Publisher's blurb (House of Books ed.)

A 'satire of modern Australian life, with settings ranging from Sydney to the Gold Coast of Queensland'. The story focuses on the comic 'efforts of the protagonist, Clem Bird, to escape the bonds of respectability, a job, matrimony and the social ambitions of his North Shore mother'.

(Sources: Murphy Women Writers and Australia, 1988; The Oxford Companion to Australian Literature, 1994.)