Crossing the Gap: Memories and Reflections: Memories and Reflections

Christopher Koch comes home to Vintage! Vintage is excited and proud to announce the publication of Chrisopher Koch's impressive backlist of titles: Crossing the Gap: Memories and Reflections The Boys in the Island Out of Ireland 'No Australian novelist has done more to capture Asia for the Australian imagination that Koch.' The Australian Republished with two brand new pieces, Crossing the Gap is a fascinating insight into a major Australian novelist's development. This collection of short works employs the memoir as a springboard, presenting us with reflections on literature and an analysis of Australia's changing place in the world over the author's lifetime - a lifetime stretching from the British Empire of his childhood to the post-colonial present. Crossing the Gap, the title piece of the collection, has a particular topical interest, dealing as it does with the shift from Empire to a new Asia-Pacific consciousness. Koch's recollection take us through several continents and an unusual range of topics, from his native island of Tasmania to London in the 1950s; from newly independent India to Sukarno's Indonesia; from California in the 1960s, with Ken Kesey and Larry McMurtry, to the China of Chairman Mao in the 1980s. It is a rich and exciting mixture, charting a novelist's growth and the influences which have shaped him. Rave reviews for Crossing the Gap 'His essays offer stiking expositions of the emotions and ideas which have fuelled his fiction.' Times Literary Supplement 'With its attractive blend of autobiographical recollection, socio-cultural comment and non-academic literary criticism, the book will be indispensable to readers of Koch's fiction; it will also grip all who can be interested in one of the nation's leading intellectuals making his contribution to Australia's definition of itself.' PN Review 'It can still seem surprising that three of the most interesting 'religious' novelists in English since the Second World War, Patrick White, Randolf Stow and Christopher Koch, come from a country as ostensibly materialistic as Australia ...( Koch) commands attention by engaging his chosen subjects so energetically.' London Magazine 'Reading the ruminations of Christopher Koch ...is a bit like going for a walk in the county at night beneath a full moon. You are absorbed into the atmosphere and afterwards find no clear recollection of the earth having passed beneath your feet.' The Age 'There are sentences that stay in the mind and give pleasure long after they are read.' The Bulletin 'Crossing the Gap demonstrates again Koch's extraordinary skill at rendering the feeling and texture of places.' The Canberra Times

About the Author :
Christopher Koch was born and educated in Tasmania. For a good deal of his life he was a broadcasting producer, working for the ABC in Sydney. He has lived and worked in London and elsewhere overseas. He has been a fulltime writer since 1972, winning international praise and a number of awards for his novels, many of which are translated in a number of European countries. One of his novels, The YEAR OF LIVING DANGEROUSLY, was made into a film by Peter Weir and was nominated for an Academy Award. He has twice won the Miles Franklin award for fiction: for THE DOUBLEMAN and HIGHWAYS TO A WAR. In 1995 Koch was made an Officer of the Order of Australia for his contribution to Australian literature. His most recent novel is THE MEMORY ROOM won the CAL Waverley Award for Literature in 2008.