In A Word in Edgeways  Desmond O’ Grady examines the work of many writers and interviews others as well as film makers, a ballerina, a photographer and a painter.

The essays probe writers from Orhan Pamuk to Peter Robb, from Martin Boyd to James Joyce, from Ring Lardner to Leo Tolstoy plus filmmakers Luis Bunuel and Federico Fellini.

The interviews are close encounters with writers such as Saul Bellow, Tennesee Williams, Shirley Hazzard, Jorge Luis Borges, Tobias Wolf, Doris Lessing and Niccolò Ammaniti but also with filmmaker Sergio Leone, photographer Oliviero Toscani and painter Jeffrey Smart. 

A Word in Edgeways combines cultural journalism, literary criticism, travel writing and brief lives. In all the items there is subtle insight, an eye for revealing detail and an appreciation of craft. They are preceded by the amusing, amazing tale of the confusion between Desmond O’Grady and his doppelganger and drawn together by reflections on the relations between oral story telling, writing and images.

“ Desmond O’Grady’s art shines in the essay form and the interview as it does in his fiction. His vantage point in Rome, his travels in Europe and the United States, and his homecomings to Australia, give this collection an astonishing range. Lively but never lightweight, A Word in Edgeways shows O’Grady’s discerning eye, and his gift for finding the unexpected even in those much celebrated figures about whom we thought there was nothing more to say” - Brenda Niall.