Two novellas by John Fraser with the common theme of complicity.

The Way Back explores the experience of war, of civil war, of flight, rejection, scams and endless voyages.

In Elementary Exercises, protagonists who feel they're privileged - as critics, artists, 'free spirits' - engage with authoritarian regimes and contexts, sad relationships conceived as necessary to escape from difficult situations.

John Fraser has lived near Rome since 1980. Previously, he worked in England and Canada.

Of Fraser's fiction the Whitbread Award winning poet John Fuller has written:

'One of the most extraordinary publishing events of the past few years has been the rapid, indeed insistent, appearance of the novels of John Fraser. There are few parallels in literary history to this almost simultaneous and largely belated appearance of a mature œuvre, sprung like Athena from Zeus's forehead; and the novels in themselves are extraordinary. I can think of nothing much like them in fiction. Fraser maintains a masterfully ironic distance from the extreme conditions in which his characters find themselves. There are strikingly beautiful descriptions, veiled allusions to rooted traditions, unlikely events half-glimpsed, abrupted narratives, surreal but somehow apposite social customs.'

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