Bryce Courtenay remains one of the highest selling Australians writers of all times, with sales of more than 20 million of his blockbuster stories of life in Africa and in Australia. Beginning with the Power of One, which became a classic, he took off as a novelist in his fifties after a successful career in advertising. But his beginnings were far from promising and it took all his willpower and drive to overcome poverty, illegitimacy and hard physical labour to achieve his childhood ambition.

His second wife Christine Gee has written a loving, very subjective memoir-biography of the man whom she first came to know professionally as his publicist and researcher. When Bryce started to make romantic overtures to her, she was less than sure about changing the nature of their relationship. But Bryce was not a man who gave up easily.

This is an intimate portrait of a man whose past provided him with tremendous material and a capacity for empathy for anyone who struggled. Thanks to discovering a cache of letters to his mother, Christine Gee has been able to tell the full story of larger-than-life Bryce as never before.