It’s the Culture

What’s going on?

Lino Squagliace has been sent to Brazil to report on Excet, a sprawling financial complex which may be ripe for an American takeover. He is overwhelmed by a seemingly random labyrinth of technology, sex, luxury, drugs and financial genius which could be either a gold mine or a land mine.

How can Lino cope with a society where the street muggers are young and pretty, adults legally adopt other adults and grown men fight with guns over the right to a parking space? Will he become used to having personal bodyguards, before and behind, who slip in and out of the shadows as he explores this most exotic of cultures?

And what will Lino’s billionaire patron think of company executives who sometimes embrace Lino (intimately as well as figuratively) but at other times seem bent on manipulating his trusted auditor into being the front man for a complicated financial scam?

About the Author: 

CHESTER GRAHAM was christened Philip Michael Richard Graham in February 1936.  His father was a high-ranking RAAF officer and his mother active in Sydney ‘society’.  Chester was parked in a Roman Catholic boarding school where he divided his time between winning academic awards and absconding from the school whenever possible. 

He took the name Chester at the University of Sydney in the 1950s and quickly became known as an aesthete, a poet, and a major cog within all the cogs that drove university drama, revue and the student newspaper, Honi Soit.  He had many friends and a remarkable range of interests.  He knew all there was to know about cars and loved cats, but nobody is perfect.

He never attained a Sydney degree, probably because he never sat his exams. He left for Britain in the early 1960s (his friends, Clive James, Robert Hughes and many others had freshly travelled the self-same path) but was side-tracked and fell in love with Italy.  Eventually he made it to Britain, took a degree in Linguistics from Reading University and moved to Portugal where his first novel was lost to an incoming tide while he was camping on a beach near Oporto.  He moved to Brazil to avoid the aftermath of the Portuguese Revolution and spent the next twenty-five years translating, interpreting and teaching in Brazil, a country and culture he came to love.  When the economy crashed he sold his house to pay his taxes and returned to Australia, arriving on the last day of 1999, on the brink of the non-event that was Y2K.  He continued to write and teach and worked as a volunteer for the Greens until his death in February 2021.  This is his first published novel.