A Brief Affair

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'More than one ghost haunts this tender novel about love in its many guises, condoned and illicit. In his deceptively simple, lucid prose, Alex Miller examines the emotional contradictions inherent in apparent opposites as his central character learns to draw strength and inspiration from unlikely places. Hauntingly beautiful, A Brief Affair will resonate long after its pages are closed.' Sylvia Martin, author of Ink in Her Veins: The Troubled Life of Aileen Palmer

From the bustling streets of China, to the ominous Cell 16 in an old asylum building, to the familiar sounds and sight of galahs flying over a Victorian farm, A Brief Affair is a tender love story.

On the face of it, Dr Frances Egan is a woman who has it all - a loving family and a fine career - until a brief, perfect affair reveals to her an imaginative dimension to her life that is wholly her own.

Fran finds the courage and the inspiration to risk everything and change her direction at the age of forty-two. This newfound understanding of herself is fortified by the discovery of a long-forgotten diary from the asylum and the story it reveals.

Written with humour, sensitivity and the wisdom for which Miller's work is famous, this exquisitely compassionate novel explores the interior life and the dangerous navigation of love in all its forms.



'...richly satisfying and luminous.' Emeritus Professor, Tom Griffiths


'A wise, atmospheric novel from a master.' Susan Wyndham, The Guardian

Author Bio

Alex Miller is the award-winning author of thirteen novels and a collection of essays and stories. He is published internationally and widely in translation. Miller is twice winner of the Miles Franklin Literary Award, for The Ancestor Game and for Journey to the Stone Country. He is an overall winner of the Commonwealth Writers' Prize in 1993 for The Ancestor Game. Conditions of Faith and Lovesong are both winners of the Christina Stead Prize for Fiction in the NSW Premier's Awards. Landscape of Farewell was awarded the Chinese 21st Century Weishanhi Best Foreign Novel of the Year and the Manning Clark Medal for Miller's outstanding contribution to Australian cultural life. Autumn Laing received the Melbourne Prize for Literature, and Coal Creek, the Victorian Premier's Literary Award. Miller's work of non-fiction, Max, was shortlisted for the National Biography Award in 2021. His most recent novel, A Brief Affair, was first published in 2022 and Miller's collection of letters and notebooks, A Kind of Confession-a deeply personal, behind-the-scenes exploration of Miller's six-decade writing life-was published in 2023.