Surreally hard-edged, the world [the short novel, Child's Play, and the short stories, "Eustace" and "The Prowler," project] is one where details have a hallucinatory vividness and patterns stand out with stark clarity: only significance remains creepily opaque.

Like the dreams that regularly perturb their characters, the short novel and two stories gathered here are intensely enigmatic. Though geographically a world apart—Italy is the background to the novel, Australia to the stories—all three fictions cover the same imaginative ground. Whatever the ostensible setting, Malouf's locales invariably turn out to be disorientating mazes, full of echoing de Chirico perspectives and trompe l'oeil Magritte effects. Ranged in cryptic symmetries around them, the same types recur. Particularly favoured is the threatening solitary, some ominous loner endowed with "the ambiguous gift of singularity". Central to these three pieces are, respectively, an outsider, an intruder, and an interloper. Anti-social figures, they...