Like The Great Gatsby, to which it was favorably compared by more than one reviewer, Summerland is a novel that explores the dreams and deceits, the desires and delusions, of the very wealthy. Malcolm Knox's debut novel concerns the lives of two young couples-four intimately close friends-who grow up, and grow apart, amid the seaside mansions, golf courses, and patio parties of Palm Beach, an Australian resort town, late in the twentieth century. Richard, our narrator, looks over the shores of Sydney Harbor at the outset of the novel, and then spends all night looking back on the halcyon, and later troubled, days and nights he spent with his best friend Hugh, a charismatic heir to power and money beyond compare, and with their respective childhood sweethearts, Pup and Helen. Courtships become marriages, marriages become liabilities, and the closer Richard looks at his memories, the more his nostalgia turns to nihilism-for the story of Hugh and Helen and Richard and Pup is a suspenseful, masterly told tale of secrets and lies, infatuation and rejection, luxury and self-destruction. In the lost loves, anguished affairs, and dashed hopes of the charming and youthful quartet who animate the pages of Summerland, we inevitably confront the romantic disillusion and tragic ruin of society's richest and most privileged.