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  • Published: 26 October 2011
  • ISBN: 9781742746630
  • Imprint: Random House Australia
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 214

Room Service




A hilarious spoof of travel books.

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 amou

nt 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.

  • Published: 26 October 2011
  • ISBN: 9781742746630
  • Imprint: Random House Australia
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 214

About the author

Frank Moorhouse

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 1970s became a full-time writer. He won national prizes for his fiction, non-fiction, and essays. He was best known for the highly acclaimed Edith trilogy, Grand Days, Dark Palace, and Cold Light, novels which follow the career of an Australian woman in the League of Nations in the 1920s and 1930s through to the International Atomic Energy Agency in the 1970s as she struggled to become a diplomat. His last book The Drover’s Wifea reading adventure published in October 2017, brings together works inspired by Henry Lawson’s story and examines the attachment Australia has to the story and to Russell Drysdale’s painting of the same name. Frank was awarded a number of fellowships including writer in residence at King’s College Cambridge, a Fulbright Fellowship, and a fellowship at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington. 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 made a Doctor of the University by Griffith University in 1997 and a Doctor of Letters (honoris causa) by the University of Sydney, 2015. Frank Moorhouse died, in Sydney, on 26 June 2022.

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Praise for Room Service

Moorhouse is dry, even delicate in style. The characteristic fate of his characters is fiasco

Newsweek

A brilliant narrative, corrosive humour, the revelation of a great writer who X-rays the Australian soul ...

Le Matin

Moorhouse is an acknowledged craftsman

Mark McLeod, Sydney Morning Herald