An elusive, elliptical, often beautiful thread of recollections and observations, He. is not autobiography, or even memoir, but an almost anonymous portrait of a figure passing through time and circumstances.

It begins with boyhood, in suburban Adelaide after the war. As the narrator remembers the years the focus shifts forward to the recent past and back again, often within the same paragraph, mirroring the randomness of memory. Through these vignettes and fragments we glimpse moments and lives—of parents, teachers, wives, and others; in Bombay of the 1960s, London of the 1970s, Melbourne and Sydney.

He. is by Murray Bail, the acclaimed author of such classic novels as Homesickness and Eucalyptus.