Book is in excellent condition. First edition 2007 CQU Press publication...The novel begins with the suggestively named anti-hero Plant, sitting in his car one day in a quiet Sydney suburb while he watches with surprise and mild alarm a man of his own age being beaten up in the street. The victim, who is ludicrously named Fullalove, is assaulted in the course of his duties as a "research assistant" to celebrity writer Scobie Spruce. Scobie is publicly known as a National Treasure ; privately, however, he's a slave to prescription drugs and his termagant wife Claudia. Fullalove, fed up with his job, resigns and Plant takes over. By the end of the novel we've realised why Plant is called Plant and we've seen perhaps more than we wanted to of the secret life of the successful Australian writer, satire or not. Like Academia Nuts it's a fable about the relentless commercialisation of what used to be the life of the mind, at once very depressing and very funny.