Peter Goldsworthy was born in Minlaton, South Australia, in 1951. He grew up in various country towns, finishing his schooling in Darwin. Since graduating in medicine from the University of Adelaide, he has devoted his time equally to medicine and writing. He is married to a fellow graduate and they have three children.

Peter Goldsworthy has published three collections of poetry, including This Goes With That: Selected Poems 1970-1990. He is the author of four collections of short fiction, including Little Deaths, and four novels, including Honk if You Are Jesus and Wish. He has won numerous awards including the Commonwealth Poetry Prize and an Australian Bicentennial Literary Award

Against the backdrop of Darwin - that small, tropical hothouse of a port, half-outback, half-oriental, lying at the tip of northern Australia - a young and newly arrived southerner encounters the 'maestro', a Viennese refugee with a shadowed past. The occasion is a piano lesson, the first of many...