The Opening Lines:
The woman on the telephone is on the cusp, somewhere between a nanny-ish desire for precision and ethnic cleansing.
“You’re not from here, are you?”

Selected Praise and Accolades:

-Shortlisted for the 2007 John and Margaret Savage 1st Novel Award.

“Armstrong’s prose style is what really stands out. He’s able to nail down a description with language that is at once poetic and quite funny.
- Mark Callanan, The Independent

“Hilarious and deeply human. Most people will enjoy this for its lighthearted and humorous surface value, and deeper readers will marvel in the greater subsurface connotations.”
- Chad Pelley, Current Magazine

From the Backcover

On a snowy winter night, Gerry Adamson hides from his family in a laid-up sailboat. Pushing sixty, holed-up with a laptop, he’s trying to make a novel out of thirty-odd years of compromises and betrayals that have seen him go from youthful erratic passion to late-middle-aged dithering. He’s making one last effort to make it mean something.