Seven Types of Ambiguity

'One of the 50 most important writers in the world' -- Lire (France)

Is it mad to love in spite of the evidence...or just necessary?

'There is ambiguity in most human relationships. Like a sequence of words, a relationship can be open to different interpretations. And when two people have differing views, not merely of the state of their relationship, but of its very nature, it can affect the entire course of their lives.' Following years of unrequited love, an out-of-work school teacher decides to take matters into his own hands, triggering a chain of events that neither he nor his psychiatrist could have anticipated.

At once a psychological thriller and a social critique, Seven Types of Ambiguity is a story of obsessive love in an age of obsessive materialism. It's a story of impulse and paralysis, of empty marriages, lovers and a small boy, gambling and the market, of adult children and their parents, of poetry and prostitution, psychiatry and the law. Brimming with emotional, intellectual and moral dilemmas, the page-turning story - reminiscent of the richest fiction of the nineteenth century in its labyrinthine complexity - unfolds at a rapid-fire pace to reveal the full extent to which these people have been affected by each other and by the insecure and uncertain times in which they live.

'Where, critics have asked, is Australia's equivalent of Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections, or Philip Roth's American Pastoral? Now, with Perlman's achingly humane, richly layered, seamlessly constructed masterpiece, it seems that we have it' -- Canberra Times