Winner of the Vance Palmer Award for Fiction, Victorian Premier's Literary Prize, 1995. Albion Gidley Singer creates his world as a vast collection of facts-facts he uses to support his own power and status. After an awkward childhood, aware that he is a disappointment to his father, he acquires, the trappings of respectability-success in business, a family. But beneath his comically grand exterior, Albion's soul remains a dark place of fear and loathing, driving him to terrifying deeds. Kate G