Robert Crofts, a young Englishman, arrives in Australia in the 1950s, determined to inhabit the outback. After five years of life on the land, he makes his way to Melbourne where, living in a boarding house, working as a cleaner, he finds himself consumed by a burning need to read, write, draw, create. When he meets the enigmatic Lena, she instantly becomes his staunchest champion but as their tortured marriage evolves and gradually erodes she ultimately becomes an obstacle.

This intensely autobiographical novel has much to say about the compulsion to create, and the fundamental unknowability of even our most intimate partners. As the reader sinks into the text of this singular book, the artifice of fiction gradually melts away, leaving nothing but truth on the page. In The Passage of Love Alex Miller has given us a masterful work which will come to define his career as one of the great writers of our time.

elegiac...in [its] passion and urgency * Irish Times *
A rich addition to the growing shelf of autofiction from a seasoned storyteller. * Kirkus Reviews *
Miller is a treasure from the land Down Under...Why we haven't been reading him for years, I honestly can't imagine. * Irish Times *
Miller reveals most clearly the delicacy of his understanding of human nature...a tactful and intelligent writer. * The Guardian *
Told in sinewy, taciturn prose, Coal Creek is a brilliantly realised character piece. * Glasgow Herald *
Alex Miller's Coal Creek is a triumph. If ever there were an example of a novelist simultaneously commanding yet somehow at the mercy of a character's voice, this is it. * Tim Winton *

Alex Miller is the author of twelve novels. He has twice won the prestigious Miles Franklin Literary Award, Australia's premier literary prize; the first occasion in 1993 for The Ancestor Game, and again in 2003 for Journey to the Stone Country. He is also an overall winner of the Commonwealth Writers' Prize, for The Ancestor Game, in 1993. British by birth, he now lives in Victoria.