Product Description
Man of Letters is the third and final volume in the Dog Rock trilogy, completing David Foster's comic vision of a small rural town in New South Wales as over fifty years it gradually succumbs to economic imperatives, as witnessed from the perspective of the postman D'Arcy D'Oliveres.
In his final appearance, the intrepid D'Arcy has a mystery to solve that involves a local musician, a stamp of the realm, a dodgy personalised numberplate and a retired sergeant of police now turned student of semiotics. Man of Letters is a very funny book from the writer the Manchester Guardian described as the worthy successor to Flann O'Brien.
David Foster is one of Australia's best known and most respected novelists. In addition to writing twelve other novels, including the Miles Franklin Award winning The Glade Within the Grove (1997), he has worked intermittently for Australia Post over the past forty years, as a postman, relief postman and mail contractor in both the ACT and rural NSW.
REVIEWS
“The Dog Rock novels sit at the congenial end of the spectrum of his often irascible and combative fiction. Man of Letters has some satirical sport with the proliferating acronyms and abbreviations of modern English, but its comical depiction of the townspeople is affectionate and forgiving.”
JAMES LEY, The Australian
“David Foster’s earlier Dog Rock novels came out of his experience as a Bundanoon postman in the 1980s. A recent brief return to his old run has provided irresistible material for a further comic foray into rural life.”
SUSAN LEVE, Australian Book Review
“David Foster is a most courageous writer. For some 40 years now, he has demonstrated his courage by way of long, intricate, often obscure and almost always highly erudite novels that offend contemporary pieties and sensibilities: treading on toes and getting up noses seems to be his modus operandi.”
ANDREW RIEMER, Sydney Morning Herald
