Ex-garbo Giovanni O’Grady’s ancestry is Celt, with a bit of Italian and Viking dick dipped in. As an ageing straight pale male, he therefore belongs to a dwindling and increasingly irrelevant Aussie majority. Johnno (as he is known) holds some ‘unacceptable’ but often accurate views. Those which aren’t tend to be re-balanced every Monday by his philosopher hairdresser pal Ed Hedland. In Basalt Bay, a former fishing village contaminated by the ultra-wealthy, Johnno rents a caravan park donga and lives as a quite contented malcontent. Then comes an unwelcome medical diagnosis. Yet… unwelcome? Frankly, for a bloke fed-up with witnessing his nation’s wankification, an exit door has swung open.

“Jim Ewing’s second novel Two That Got Away is an eccentric, diabolically un-PC comic caper featuring disgruntled writer and actor William James “Walrus” Rose. Ewing is a humourist with a great gift for the Australian vernacular. If the comic profusion of the prose can be as wild and foaming as the waves Rus voyages over, and the author takes an unseemly relish in rocking the boat, the book’s ocean of Ozploitation remains a bit of a hoot to read.”

— Cameron Woodhead, senior theatre critic for The Age