Quicksilver

`Hugely impressive...Magpie brilliance.' * Guardian * `The sentences flow gracefully like smoke from a cigarette...the work runs in a wholly absorbing way, where discursive style and fiction mingle to become indistinguishable...Remarkable.' * Sunday Age * `A caster of spells.' * Australian Book Review * `Nicolas Rothwell is a weird and wonderful writer. In this new book, Quicksilver, he takes the form of nonfiction and turns it into an extraordinary drama of spiritual quests and cultural hauntings.' * Australian * `Fluent and expressive prose, which always seems to be moving towards the rhapsodic while stopping short of actual indulgence' * Age * `It is impossible to understand Australia without venturing into the interior and far reaches of the continent. Divining the sacred, Rothwell moves effortlessly from Eastern Europe and Soviet Russia to the Pilbara.' -- Mark McKenna * Australian Book Review * `The Czech-Australian journalist Nicolas Rothwell could be described in many ways, but perhaps most economical is as wanderer and wonderer: across territories, eras, peoples and cultural boundaries. This collection of essays takes us to the Australian interior, to the High Tatra in Slovakia, to the ruptures and upheavals of central Europe in the 1980s, and to the prison camps of the Soviet Union: Gorky, Tolstoy, Tarkovsky, Darwin, Lawrence are some of our travelling companions. Its title piece is an astonishingly suggestive and beautiful linking of the life and times of Jewish mystic and cult leader Jacob Frank to the latter-day exploration-or exploitation-by outsiders of the Aboriginal artists of the Western Desert.' * Guardian *