Bill Leak’s first novel, Heart Cancer, is a quasi-picaresque larrikin’s progress that unexpectedly turns into a tale about addiction and self-destruction. It is an enterprising book, but Leak has the difficulty any novelist might in getting the two tones – the comic and the serious – properly balanced.

The larrikin is Frank Thornton, a working-class boy born in the 1950s and raised in a home dominated by Mick, his violent and abusive father. The novel tracks Frank’s rise from his chaotic schooldays and youth through to his selfish prime as a successful advertising copywriter, culminating in a mid-life catastrophe, an attack of the heart cancer of the title. In the last phase of the novel, Frank is helped by Jack Hayes, a tough-minded but saintly doctor, and Xin-Xin Le Rocq, a beautiful Chinese-Australian novelist, fourteen years Frank’s junior and his lover.