I wanted to write about complacency, the fact that Australia at the turn of the century had become one of the wealthiest and most prosperous nations on the planet. Having said farewell to Europe in my last book, I was hungry to write about an Australia I rarely saw represented on the pages of Australian literature or on screen.

I live in the northern suburbs of the city, where from my backyard I can see the spires of Catholic and Orthodox churches, the minaret of a mosque. My parents live in a suburb three stations away from Ramsey Street their neighbours are Chinese, Vietnamese, Egyptian, Maltese and Greek. But I needed to give voice to the reality of the contemporary Australian suburb, one of high-street shops in which one can hear dozens of languages, populated by generations who have never felt an allegiance to a colonial British and Celtic history. These suburbs define a nation that was created simultaneously with the birth of the car: the suburbs as portrayed in Neighbours and Home & Away. I wanted to return to the suburbs, those vilified spaces that are not quite the city and not quite the country, in which the majority of Australians live. Having cleaved myself of my European heritage – or so I thought – I wanted to write an Australian story, one that spoke to the Australia I knew. Having finished it I wanted to be in the light again, in that vast and harsh but vivid Australian light that I miss so dearly when I have spent time away from home. The novel was written at night, set in sombre and haunted spaces. It was a dark novel, both in its themes of recurring racism and antisemitism, and in trying to give voice to the melancholy and loss that is at the heart of the immigrant and refugee experience. I have described it as my exorcising the 'Europeanness' that is one aspect of my identity and consciousness as an Australian.

In 2005 I published a novel called Dead Europe that had taken me seven years to write. Sometimes they are even tamed more often they have exhausted the writer and must be put aside until they emerge, renewed, to disturb the imagination again. T here is always a stage between novels, when the obsessions and passions that fuelled one book abate.

The slap author christos tsiolkas