An unnamed man is writing a report ‘for his files’. Like his author, the man is writing in the blurred, liminal space between fiction and non-fiction: ‘I am not writing a work of fiction, but a report of seemingly fictional matters.’ Like his author, the man has moved from the city to a remote border town, the last place he intends to live (Murnane is now based in Goroke, on the edge of Victoria’s Wimmera plains). As the man explains with measured directness: ‘I moved to this district near the border so that I could spend most of my time alone and so that I could live according to several rules that I had for long wanted to live by.’