I'll Just Tell You This, the first book in Gerard Windsor's sequence of autobiographical memoirs, marked a new direction in Australian writing. Originally published as Family Lore, it has been extensively revised and includes an additional chapter. Five generations of an Irish Australian family confess and gossip their way through these pages. With tenderness and a precision that echoes the surgical art of so many of his ancestral characters, the author lays bare the stories and the sympathies that bind this family together. This is a book about traditions, about handing on the sources of a family's life - a notion emblematically suggested in a story about the transplanting of a heart. Murderous nuns and happy deaths, shrouds and the last days of Halley's Comet, widowhood and the composition of wills - this book is seldom far from the facts of mortality, yet it pulses with life. Imaginative, whimsical, moving, it's a true original.
