Room Service

A hilarious spoof of travel books.

Frank Moorhouse and his alter ego, Francoise Blase, are at their mordant best. Their wit, satire and keen eye for detail are finely honed as they travel at home and abroad, savouring the persecution inflicted by bell captains, barmen and tour guides - together with the endless buffeting of cultural differences. Moorhouse and Francois Blase like to travel light. Carrying a typewriter, a six-pack and a healthy amount of hedonistic humor, the Australian pair tour the globe's underbelly in these brilliant pieces, exchanging barbs, witticisms and stinging insights on the ways of people. The tales dissect the anti-art of traveling and provide incisive narratives that alternately wink at their subjects and then 'whonk' them on the back Aussie style. Moorhouse also makes a solitary journey back to the 1950s, to recapture the rhythms and idiom of school and family life in a poignant account. A hilarious spoof of travel books Room Service is a collection of stories, or rather dispatches, from a feckless Australian travel writer to his long-suffering editor.

About the Author

Frank Moorhouse was born in the coastal town of Nowra, NSW. He worked as an editor of small-town newspapers and as an administrator and in the 1970s became a full-time writer. He has written fiction, non fiction, screenplays and essays and edited many collections of writing. Forty Seventeen was given a laudatory full-page review by Angela Carter in the New York Times and was named Book of the Year by the Age and 'moral winner' of the Booker Prize by the London magazine Blitz. Grand Days, the first novel in The Edith Trilogy, won the SA Premier's Award for Fiction. Dark Palace won the Miles Franklin Literary Award and was shortlisted for the NSW Premier's Literary Award, the Victorian Premier's Literary Award and the Age Book of the Year Award. Frank has undertaken numerous fellowships and his work has been translated into several languages. He was made a member of the Order of Australia for services to literature in 1985 and was awarded an honorary doctorate from Griffith University in 1997.