Lenny Bartulin is the author of the Jack Susko trilogy and a published poet. He was asked by the Sydney Morning Herald which books influenced him the most.

Guess which was #1?

(Hint: it wasn’t “The Da Vinci Code.”)

“Tropic of Cancer – Henry Miller. Miller’s exuberant, unrelenting and fantastically uneven novel descended upon my suffocated suburban teenage years like a tsunami.

Bohemian Paris, sex, the artistic impulse and the romantic ideal, the man’s unyielding faith in literature as redemption: for a while after reading it, I remained trapped in my bland world, but really I was already long gone …”