Phil Leask’s highly-readable novels are striking for their sense of place, for the complexity of their characters and for the richness of the stories they convey.

In his writing, Phil Leask is at home in many places: Hamburg or the south of France as much as in Tasmania or north Queensland. Location is important, not for its own sake but for its impact on the characters, on their way of living, on how they are seen by those around them and on the way they are with one another. In this way, the forests and mountains of Tasmania in The Slow Death of Patrick O'Reilly are comparable to the canals, streets and rivers of Olhovsky’s Hamburg.

History, too, is important, though these are not historical novels. In The Slow Death of Patrick O'Reilly, Clément Hébert is wandering on his own in Tasmania in the first thirty years of the nineteenth century, but his preoccupations are our preoccupations and his story is directly linked to our stories of ourselves and of the world we live in now. Patrick O’Reilly himself is increasingly haunted by the sense of approaching death despite his dreams of immortality.

Like Clément Hébert, many of Phil Leask’s characters are displaced and literally or metaphorically exiled. Often they are running away from or towards something; sometimes they are uprooted by accidents of history; at other times they are just strange, out of place in societies that find it difficult to value or even tolerate strangeness.

Bernard Laurent in The Slow Death of Patrick O'Reilly is haunted by memories of the second world war, Olhovsky has taken his chance to escape from Russia during the Cold War, while Lucy in Olhovsky, Prince of Hamburg – a character we never meet directly – is always elsewhere, always in one war zone or another.

These are restless characters, often on the move, rarely content to accept inaction or to slip into pessimism. They live their exile vividly, creatively, passionately, sometimes bizarrely, and usually with no expectation of a happy ending.