Award-winning journalists Steve Lewis of News Ltd and Chris Uhlmann from the ABC combine forces in this arresting novel that proves fiction is stranger than fact.

THE book’s blurb says it’s a romp through the “dark underbelly of politics” and for once the blurb doesn’t lie.

The Marmalade Files is a banquet of bastardry. There are fixers and spinners, thugs and hypocrites, treachery and hatred. Lewis and Uhlmann take a swag of cheeky liberties, starting with the background of a barely surviving minority Labor government.

They craft characters who are irresistibly recognisable and then muddy the waters, sometimes through a sex change. Take Cate “Attila the Hen” Bailey. She is fluent in Mandarin, has a work ethic bordering on the demented and is socially autistic. She talks in “wonk-strine” and became Australia’s first woman prime minister with, for a while, stratospheric approval ratings. But her fall was swift and cruel.
The main plot centres on journalist Harry Dunkley’s search for a Walkley Award-winning story after a mysterious photograph comes into his possession.

Journalists cop almost as big a hiding as the politicians do. The end, after a murder and some steamy sex, is a tease and leaves the door open for a sequel.

VERDICT: Cavalcade of caricatures

Available in BLRC: F LEW