Alex Miller, a working-class lad from 1940s London, who left home (aged 16) for Oz and the outback, going on, miraculously, to become one of Australia's most loved writers, with two Miles Franklin gongs to his name, now almost 80, has produced a memoir of 40 years, "a kind of assured biography". There's terrific stuff here: bombings and childhood in London, playing Scheherazade to a younger, very ill, brother; life on an Exmoor farm; arrival in Oz; shooting wild horses; excerpts from his novels; a last meeting with his mum. An advocate for aboriginal rights, Miller also has essays on friendships and government betrayals. The architecture of The Simplest Words is a tad dismaying, with snippets of autobiography followed by hunks of fiction, but this smorgasbord of fiction and essays is well worth diving into.
