The Secret Lives of Australians

From Slate.com:

"They were too extravagant," a character thinks in a story in this volume, "for the web of quiet incident and subtle shifts of power that were the usual stuff of his fiction." He is Colin Lattimer, an "almost famous" Australian writer returning to Brisbane, the place of his birth and youth, after an interval of 30 years. He lives in London now and scarcely recognizes his old city at first. Too many "fly-overs, multi-level carparks, tower blocks." Then he realizes that much of its old surprise and violence lingers, that "the city he knew, and in one part of himself still moved in, was out there somewhere, but out of sight, underground." The events that are too extravagant for Lattimer’s fiction now hit him in reality. Mistaken for someone else on the street, he becomes the object of an attack by a jealous husband or a betrayed lover, who finally, in his pain and derangement, attempts suicide before Lattimer’s eyes.