Quicksand (Steve Toltz, Hamish Hamilton)

This long-awaited follow-up to A Fraction of the Whole, Steve Toltz’s 2008 Booker Prize-shortlisted debut, is similarly full of larrikin philosophers, artists and eccentrics hatching schemes and generally failing at life, sometimes to the point of nationwide infamy. Well-intentioned misfits inadvertently veering into catastrophe, Aldo Benjamin and Liam Wilder could easily be cousins of Fraction’s Dean family. Aldo and Liam are lifelong friends. Aldo’s life is one of protracted misadventure and failing writer Liam has made Aldo his unwilling muse. Liam is a garden-variety loser—after 20 or so years on the police force, when he corrects a known criminal who calls him detective instead of constable, the man incredulously asks, ‘still?’ There is nothing ordinary about Aldo though, an individual so beset by bad luck that his repeated inability to commit suicide leads him to a conclusion of immortality. Aldo’s misadventures are recounted initially through Liam’s eyes, then Liam’s manuscript, Aldo’s disgusted response, a rather longwinded courtroom transcript and some navel-gazing prison poetry. There is certainly a lightness—and at times laugh-out-loud hilarity—to this tale of thwarted ambitions, failed relationships and questionable artistic ability, but ultimately Aldo’s bad luck tips into tragedy and Toltz, for all his comedic cleverness, is equally skilled with pathos.

Portia Lindsay is general manager for Seizure Online and a former bookseller