The story of Paterson Curse grabs you by the scruff of the neck and drags you through a hedge backwards. And that’s just for starters.

Absurd, gritty, heartrending and vividly told, the story romps through childhood in colonial Africa, staggers through teenage Dublin, and collapses in antipodean middle life crisis - before finally getting its shit together and soaring into new life, love, and the tender mercies of a Western Sydney proctologist.

Paterson’s life, from meeting Swazi King Sobhuza II and his sixty wives, churns through the turbulence of African independence and is sweetened at last by the taste of monkey jerky on the pristine beaches of pre-war Mozambique.

Teenage years in New Wave Dublin, and adulthood of sorts, spiced with Pan fried chili catfish savoured in the claustrophobic backstreets of New Orleans, merge into the agoraphobic vastness of outback Australia.

Gripping and raw, we are taken on a whirlwind journey: tragic and absurd but always compelling.