Winner of the 2002 NSW Premier's Literary Awards Book of the Year and the Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry

It's the late 1970s, early 1980s: choices have been made, careers established and now new tales need to be told of Kevin the heroin czar, Stubbsy the entrepreneur, Gibbo the comedian and Sophie, Hannah and Carrie, three women, each set on making their mark.

And through this decade consumed by melodrama and farce, money and nothing ambles Kim Lacy: drug importer, merchant banker, a two-faced charmer forever on the approximate make.

The second part of Alan Wearne's Australian epic continues to chart the sleaze, mayhem and humanity that form the life of a nation.

Alan Wearne has been part of Australian poetry since his Monash days of 1967-68. His collections include Public Relations (1972) and New Devil, New Parish (1976), the latter containing the verse novella Out Here, which was republished in Britain in 1987. His award-winning verse novel The Nightmarkets, published in 1986, has since been adapted for the stage, and he has written a fantasy satire on Melbourne and its football culture, Kicking in Danger (1997). In 1999 he hosted 'Conversations with a Dead Poet', a television documentary about his late friend and collegue John Forbes.

The Lovemakers Book One was published in 2001 to critical acclaim, and was awarded the 2002 NSW Premier's Literary Awards Book of the Year; the Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry; and the 2002 Arts Queensland Judith Wright Calanthe Award for Australian Poetry.

His one intellectual love being history, Alan is a graduate in that subject from LaTrobe University.This is a tour de force of style and observation, with an Australian language that is as artfully constructed as CJ Dennis, as deadly and ironic as Barry Humphries, as loquaciously imagined as Jack Hibberd and more mordantly observed than David Williamson ... it's a loaded vernacular, using all the rhythm and bounce we learned from the Americans, and applied to a world and characters which only we, we Australians, know.
Garrie Hutchinson

What soap opera and mini-series could only dream of.
Ken Bolton

The Lovemakers can be read as an exciting story; it is also poetry on a grand scale.
Peter Porter

Such is the sensitivity of Wearne's portrayal of adolescence, in particular, that it doesn't matter which Australian suburb you were brought up in, you are likely to find an important part of your own experience in this book.
Ivor Indyk