My Life as a Fake

Sarah Wode-Douglass edits a struggling London poetry journal. In Kuala Lumpur in 1972 she comes across Christopher Chubb, an Australian with a volume of Rilke, in a bicycle repair shop, who shows her a fragment of astonishing verse. Chubb is infamous. Years before in Melbourne, a traditionalist poet out to expose pretension, he invented Bob McCorkle, a rough, sexually frank working-class poet who had supposedly died young, and fooled the most daring literary magazine of the day into printing his work; its editor was then put on trial for obscenity. In the courtroom a man who looked like the fake poet stood up. Before Sarah can get the manuscript, Chubb insists she hear his story of false identity, a killing, an abduction and exile, in which the poet he made up hunts him down.

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About the book

Form

Novel

Set in

Malaysia, Australia

First published

2003

Author's age

60 when first published

ISBN

9781740512466 (Random House Australia, Australia)

9780571216185 (Faber and Faber, United Kingdom)

9780375414985 (Alfred A. Knopf, United States)

9780571216208 (Faber and Faber, United Kingdom)

9781400030880 (Vintage, United States)

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