The Deal

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A powerful and perceptive novel from two-time Miles Franklin Award winner Alex Miller.

'Miller has created a body of writing that is now acknowledged as one of the great Australian literary achievements of the past half-century.' - Morag Fraser

It's 1975, and at the threshold of his writing career Andy McPherson is navigating how to be fully present both for his partner, Jo, and their young daughter.

When forced to take a part-time teaching job Andy meets Lang Tzu, a charismatic and intriguing man. Andy is drawn deeper into a dangerous relationship when Lang asks him to prove his friendship by brokering a risky deal for a much-desired piece of art. Andy finally consents despite Jo's opposition. In the process, Andy is in fact negotiating his own deal with himself as an artist and is compelled to face up to the conflict between his conception of art as a creative gift and the realities of the art market.

Powerful and perceptive, Miller's profound and intimate depiction of Jo and her partnership with Andy, and his poignant portrait of Lang's troubled genius, form the beating heart of this beautiful novel.

Praise for A Brief Affair by Alex Miller

' a moving study of the value of both writing and reading. In many ways it is a distillation of all of Miller's invaluable fiction.' - The Guardian

'There's a seductive, languid poetry to Alex Miller's writing that gently lulls the reader into his world and makes it a place you never want to leave. There, we are surrounded by a melange of sights, sounds, smells and most importantly characters, a place that is at once embracing and poignantly thought-provoking.' - Australian Women's Weekly

Author Bio

ALEX MILLER is the award-winning author of fourteen 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 Literary Awards. Landscape of Farewell was awarded the Manning Clark Medal for Miller's outstanding contribution to Australian cultural life and the Chinese Best Foreign Novel Award, 2008. Autumn Laing received the Melbourne Prize for Literature, and Coal Creek the Victorian Premier's Literary Award. Miller's first work of non-fiction, Max, was shortlisted for the National Biography Award in 2021. A Kind of Confession, his collected letters and diaries, was published in 2023.