J.D. Rockefeller is said to have once remarked to friends: 'Before choosing your hotel, order a martini cocktail at the bar. Then you'll know if the hotel is good enough for you...' At once a celebration of the most elegant, arcane and mysterious cocktail of them all - the martini - and a lyrical memoir of friendship and love won and lost, MARTINI: A MEMOIR is Frank Moorhouse at his melancholy and hilarious best. As he muses on the aesthetics of martini lore - olive or twist, shaken or stirred, Dorothy Parker or James Bond? - and the nature of drinking, Moorhouse reflects on the role of the martini in his own life in prose as dry and intoxicating as the martini itself.

Author Biography

Frank Moorhouse was born in the coastal town of Nowra. He worked as an editor of small-town newspapers and as an administrator but in the 1970s became a full-time writer. He has written twelve books of fiction and one non-fiction book. He has won a number of literary prizes including the Australian Literature Society's Gold Medal for 1989. FORTY-SEVENTEEN was given a laudatory full-page review by Angela Carter in the New York Times and was named Book of the Year by The Age and 'moral winner' of the Booker Prize by the London magazine Blitz. GRAND DAYS, the first of the Palais des Nations novels, won the SA Premier's Award for Fiction. DARK PALACE won the 2001 Miles Franklin Literary Award and was shortlisted for the NSW Premier's Literary Award, the Victorian Premier's Literary Award and the Age Book of the Year Award.