Master of words: The late Christopher Koch. Master of words: The late Christopher Koch. Photo: Simon Schluter
Last March, I saw Christopher Koch do a reading at Adelaide Writers' Week. In a sombre and moving session featuring writers talking about war, it was the highlight, I thought. Koch read a passage from Highways to a War about an attack by B-52 bombers. I'd never thought before about what it would be like to be on the ground as those mighty bombs fell. I was almost cowering underneath my seat.

 Koch looked well, his voice was strong and he wore his jaunty trademark cap. Six months later, he's dead. The obituaries and the tributes of friends, colleagues and critics tell us what we have lost: in the view of some, our leading novelist, one whose aim was ''to reach into the hearts and secret lives of ordinary men and women''.
All I can add is my personal experience of Koch's writing. 

 Like many readers, I first encountered his work in the bestselling 1978 novel The Year of Living Dangerously, about an Australian journalist in Sukarno's Indonesia. This book has inspired so many similar adventure stories of hardbitten Oz heroes in Asia, such as Serangoon Road on ABC TV at the moment, that we almost forget its originality and wider dimensions; the Thackeray-like sweep that led Les Murray to describe it as ''a profound and beautiful book''