In Fatih Akin's recent film, The Edge of Heaven, two characters meet for the first time in a restaurant. "How did you recognise me?" one asks. "You were the saddest-looking person in the room," the other replies. The scene could be straight from …

In 2004 Wayne Macauley published to great acclaim a novella titled Blueprints for a Barbed-Wire Canoe, with one critic even going so far as to say that "if more Australian literature was of this calibre, we'd be laughing." On the strength of his second …