Winner of the Australian Literature Society Gold Medal
Shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award
Every night for twenty nights in a hotel room in Venice, an Australian man recently diagnosed with an incurable disease writes a letter home to a friend. In these letters, against a rich background of earlier journeys in literature, with Dante as his imagined guide, he reflects on what it means to live a good life in the face of death.
`Dessaix writes with great elegance, with passion, compassion and sly wit. Literally, a wonderful book.' John Banville
`An absolutely unique book: intelligent, funny, rich, tender at the right moments, a plum pudding of stories, observations and discoveries.' Alberto Manguel
`Night Letters is exhilarating. The goads, the teasing, the question marks fired up into the atmosphere make any passive reading of it quite impossible.' The Sydney Morning Herald
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