''Murnane draws out a great deal of comedy from the distance between what his hero does and what he dreams.''—The Guardian

Adrian Sherd is a teenager in Melbourne of the 1950s—the last years before television and the family car changed suburbia forever.

Earnest and isolated, tormented by his hormones and his religious devotion, Adrian dreams of elaborate orgies with American film stars, and of marrying his sweetheart and fathering eleven children by her. He even dreams a history of the world as a chronicle of sexual frustration.

A Lifetime on Clouds is funny, honest, and sweetly told: a less ribald, Catholic Australian Portnoy's Complaint.