Paul O’Donahue is a failed novelist, lapsed Catholic and determined libertine attempting to reinvent himself amid university politics, drunken parties, intellectual posturing and sexual misadventure.

His grand declarations of independence repeatedly buckle under guilt, desire and his talent for self-sabotage, making him an unusually funny and painfully recognisable Australian antihero. Clancy turns the urban and academic world of the 1970s into existential farce, full of frantic conversation, masculine performance and failed attempts to impose coherence upon experience. The comedy is broad but sharply observed: beneath Paul’s swagger lies a young man discovering that abandoning religion and convention does not necessarily leave him with a stable self to replace them.

Published by Fitzroy’s influential independent Outback Press, A Collapsible Man was Clancy’s first novel and won the National Book Council Award. It is a wonderfully distinctive artefact of 1970s Australian literary culture, from a writer who later became an important critic, academic and teacher of Australian literature.

Outback Press, Victoria, 1975. First edition. Paperback. Great condition with minimal shelf wear.