Set in an affluent coastal enclave in Tasmania, a refugee detention centre becomes the unspoken backdrop to everyday life. 

This is a novel about people who consider themselves decent — educated, tolerant, well-intentioned — and the elaborate stories they tell themselves to remain so. Lohrey’s prose is calm, lucid, and devastatingly exact, exposing how ethical language can function less as a guide to action than as a shield against responsibility.

Unsentimental, politically alert, and structurally disciplined, The Morality of Gentlemen is a study in how harm persists not through cruelty, but through manners.