Wheel of Fortune: Volume One

When the diffident and ineffectual Derek Mann loses his teaching job in a girls’ grammar school and drifts from one temporary post to another, one of his precocious pupils gives him her grandfather’s wartime diary with a mission to return to Apartheid South Africa and find the opal mine she believes to be her rightful inheritance. Intrigue and violence bedevil the quest, which ends in a desert under the Southern Cross. The wry, often laconic style gives full reign to the characters’ latent sexuality.