Every Purpose: A novel

Many people believe that humanity's very existence is an outcome of chance and, yet, ancient wisdom literature insists that our lives have meaning and there is a time for every purpose. David Morisset's novel tells the life story of Duncan Gashford, an Australian baby boomer. The narrative mimics some of the characteristics of a biography but it adopts as its chapter sequence the times of a famous passage in the book of Ecclesiastes - birth, death, love, hate, war, peace, laughter, weeping, and the rest. Duncan is transformed by the cumulative impacts of his times and by his reactions to people and events. His metamorphosis sees a hard-working family man become someone else entirely. David Morisset is the pen name of an Australian writer whose childhood was spent in Riverstone, a small town on Sydney's semi-rural western fringe. He moved to Canberra to study at the Australian National University and then travelled the world, first as a diplomat and later as an economist. Over recent years he has published several novels as well as collections of poetry. His poem, 'Persian Princess', was commended in the John Shaw Neilson Poetry Award (2009 Fellowship of Australian Writers National Literary Awards).