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Fishing For Stars
Fishing For Stars
Jul 27, 2025 2:56 PM

Author:Bryce Courtenay

Fishing For Stars

Nicholas Duncan is a semi-retired shipping magnate who resides in idyllic Beautiful Bay in Indonesia, where he is known as the old patriarch of the islands. He is grieving the loss of his beautiful Eurasian wife, Anna, and is suffering for the first time from disturbing flashbacks to WWII, the scene of their first meeting and early love. His other wartime lover is the striking Marg Hamilton, a powerful and influential political player in Australia who has remained close to Nick.

Marg suspects Nick is suffering the onset of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and organises for a specialist to meet with him in Sydney. But when they meet, Tony Freedman stirs long-buried emotions in Nick and the two men don't hit it off. Nick leaves in an explosion of anger and finds himself in hospital after being hit by a car. Tony visits and encourages Nick to write as a form of therapy - to write about Anna.

So he sets about writing about the woman who has inspired him since his late teens, and in doing so draws us into the compelling tale of the life he has lived post war-hero days building a shipping empire, navigating international corruption, supporting his wife's third-world education crusade and loving the women who inspire him.

Reviews

Davies charts the steady draining of their lives as heroin grips their systems with engrossing conviction...very accomplished

—— The Times

Addictive...hard to put down

—— Kirkus

'His spectacular inventiveness makes the Discworld series one of the perennial joys of modern fiction'

—— Mail on Sunday

'The great Terry Pratchett, whose wit is metaphysical, who creates an energetic and lively secondary world, who has a multifarious genius for strong parody ... who deals with death with startling originality. Who writes amazing sentences'

—— New York Times

'Very clever madcap satire which has universal appeal. If you haven't tried him, this is a fun one to start with'

—— Today

Throughout the book Michelle de Krester's powerful imagination transmits an extraordinary energy to the narrative ... a remarkable achievement

—— Literary Review

Confident, meticulous plotting, her strong imagination and her precise, evocative prose. Like The Hamilton Case, The Lost Dog opens up rich vistas with its central idea and introduces the reader to a world beyond its fictional frontiers

—— Sunday Times

The Lost Dog is a haunted work, it's characters uneasy ... de Kretser's characterisations are beautifully achieved, with even minor figures vividly realised

—— TLS

Clever, engrossing novel... beautifully shaded

—— Metro

The richness of her prose and the deceptive simplicity of her storytelling make this novel deserving of repeated readings

—— Jo Caird , Sunday Telegraph Seven

Scattered throughout are brief dramas or anecdotes, involving a variety of odd and often funny characters

—— Lindsay Duguid , The Sunday Times

she writes humorously and touchingly about the less portentous garish kitsch and personal clutter that they bring with them

—— Isobel Montgomery , Guardian

Those childhood ghosts which linger into adulthood are sensitively conjured by Michelle de Kretser... This search for an animal becomes a ravishing search through the fears, hopes and attachments that make us human

—— Anita Sethi , Independent on Sunday

Told with subtlety

—— Nicola Barr , Guardian

Rose Tremain is an old-fashioned writer, in the best of ways: we care about her characters' sorrows and hope for their happiness

—— Daily Telegraph

Tremain allows us to see our country's wonders and failings as if for the first time

—— Glamour

The Wodehouse wit should be registered at Police HQ as a chemical weapon

—— Kathy Lette

Witty and effortlessly fluid. His books are laugh-out-loud funny

—— Arabella Weir

The funniest writer ever to put words to paper

—— Hugh Laurie

The greatest comic writer ever

—— Douglas Adams

P.G. Wodehouse wrote the best English comic novels of the century

—— Sebastian Faulks

Sublime comic genius

—— Ben Elton

You don't analyse such sunlit perfection, you just bask in its warmth and splendour

—— Stephen Fry
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