Highly innovative, personal and idiosyncratic; Lurie’s poetic use of language tells the story of a man whose daughter commits suicide and how he deals with it. Lurie has been compared with acclaimed American writers such as Philip Roth, Saul Bellow and Woody Allen. Morris Lurie’s vast body of work includes novels, short stories, non-fiction collections and children’s books, among them his first comic novel Rappaport, his autobiography Whole Life and a book voted by Australian schoolchildren as their favourite, The Twenty-Seventh Annual African Hippopotamus Race.