Sumner Locke Elliott was an expatriate Australian novelist and former radio, television, and stage dramatist, whose birth in Kogarah, a southern suburb of Sydney, on 17 October 1917, resulted in the death of his mother the following day. The responsibility he carried, both as child and adult, from his knowledge of this consequence--coupled with his father's almost immediate formal abandonment of him--directed the course of much of Elliott's life and writing.

The search for both mother and self dominates Elliott's work, particularly his novels, the realist form of which provided him with a sense of control over the temporal and spatial boundaries of his life: Elliott never diverted from the exploration of self and family as his canvas, nor did he cease exploring the distortion of time, place, and circumstance to produce a shifting in outcome, a testing of apparent truth. While frequently declaring himself a great believer in "Fate...