Fools' Paradise: Life in an Altered State

Description

‘Wake up, Australia,’ Grafton Everest exhorts viewers every morning on Australia-wide breakfast television. This doesn’t please those he attacks like wily former premier Hoogstraden, whose biography Grafton is forced into writing. Grafton’s day job as Professor of LifeSkills and Hospitality is under threat from the economically and sexually rapacious Vice-Chancellor Deirdre Morrow. And Lee Horton, head of Australia’s newly privatised Secret Service trading as Spyforce Australia is worried too. He knows that Grafton has trouble lying. And nothing is more dangerous than a man who habitually tells the truth.

‘Grafton Everest is a wonderful creation whom I would place without question in the ranks of Philip Roth’s Portnoy and Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim.’ – Barry Humphries

‘Conquering Everest.’ – Howard Jacobson, The Observer

‘Fools' Paradise is Grafton Everest’s most over-the-top excursion  – it has more sex than before, crazier politics, more pointless academic life, a tighter net of anxieties. Some might say the real world forced Ross Fitzgerald and Trevor Jordan’s hands.’ – Carl Harrison-Ford

 Fools' Paradise was launched at the 2011 Melbourne Writers Festival.