From the time he was a little boy, Patrick White wrote letters - brilliant, gossipy, angry, heartfelt letters. When he died in 1990, at the age of 78, between 2500 and 3000 of these letters survived, scattered all over the world. In the course of producing his biography of the Nobel-Prize winning novelist, author of Voss and The Tree of Man, Marr tracked down most of them. He has assembled a selection of more than 600 letters to present a picture of White in his own uninhibited words - as a writer, as a friend (or enemy), as a man deeply and painfully engaged in the world.