A fascinating insight into a major Australian novelist's development, this collection of pieces employs the memoir as springboard, presenting us with reflections on literature and an analysis of Australia's changing place in the world over the author's lifetime - a lifetime stretching from the British Empire of his childhood to the post-colonial present. 'Crossing the Gap', the title piece of the collection, has a particular topical interest, dealing as it does with the shift from Empire to a new Asia-Pacific consciousness.

'His essays offer striking expositions of the emotions and ideas which have fuelled his fiction.' The Times Literary Supplement

'Reading the ruminations of Christopher Koch ... is a bit like going for a walk in the country at night beneath a full moon. You are absorbed into the atmosphere and afterwards find no clear recollection of the earth having passed beneath your feet.' The Age

'No novelist has done more to capture Asia for the Australian imagination than Koch.' Greg Sheridan, Foreign Editor, The Australian