Orphaned by losing his mother at three and his father–who went missing at eight–Sydney author Francis Ravel Harvey avoided the Welfare State by being raised by four older sisters in the colorful environs of Sydney in the 1930s. The search for his cultivated English father is a constant thread throughout the book and reaches an amazing and heartbreaking conclusion when the author finally uncovers the truth surrounding his father’s death.

Harvey’s writing has been compared by one critic with that of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, for his ability to create a real sense of suspense and drama from his memories and for the description of the colorful characters who inhabited his world.

Journalist and author, Francis Ravel Harvey was born at Homebush, New South Wales in 1930 and began his career as a cadet journalist on the Sun newspaper in 1947. In 1950 he worked for almost ten years as producer of the independent monthly music journal The Canon. He worked as a freelance journalist in the live theatre in Sydney, wrote scripts for the ABCs Tales of Many Lands, and episodes of Homicide for Crawford’s in Melbourne. In 1959 he founded his own bi-monthly magazine Theatregoer which ran for five years and published the first theatre yearbook for the Australian Elizabethan Theatre Trust (1959-60). He was theatre critic for the Canberra Times in the 70s. and then worked as an editor and writer for Horwitz Publications and Ure Smith, founding the first magazine in Australia on industrial design, Design Australia, for the Industrial Design Council of Australia, which was endorsed by the Duke of Edinburgh.