AustLit

'If you were a bookwork as a child, your memories are measured not only in family or school or public events, but in stories you read. You remember vividly the smell, the touch, the sight of certain books. You clearly remember picking them up from the shelf - an ordinary act - and thenthe extraordinary happening as you open the book and fall straight into another world. The pure pleasure of it, the immediate liberation. For me, who loved fairytales and fantasy, who longed to go through looking-glass, the wardrobe, stepping through the borders into another world, where anything might happen, it was also a blessed escape from the confusing, disturbing and tumultuous family dramas that dominated my childhood. In those stories of another worlds, I found pleasure and consolation, transformation and possibility. And I found my own calling as a writer.' (Author's introduction, 198)