Three Dollars is a novel

Novel

A novel is a book of long narrative in literary prose. The genre has historical roots both in the fields of the medieval and early modern romance and in the tradition of the novella. The latter supplied the present generic term in the late 18th century....

 by Australia

Australia

Australia , officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country in the Southern Hemisphere comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous smaller islands in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. It is the world's sixth-largest country by total area...

n writer Elliot Perlman

Elliot Perlman

Elliot Perlman is an Australian author and barrister. He has written two novels and one short story collection.-Life:Perlman is the son of second-generation Jewish Australians of East European descent...

, his first published novel. A movie of the same name

Three Dollars

Three Dollars is a 2005 Australian film, directed by Robert Connolly and based on a novel of the same name by Elliot Perlman. It won the 2005 Australian Film Institute Award for Best Adapted Screenplay....

 based on the novel was released in 2005.

Plot summary

The novel is set in Melbourne. The first-person narrator, Eddie Harnovey, is a Chemical Engineer, married to Tanya, an aspiring but ultimately uncontracted Political Science academic. Eddie is from middle class origins, his father being a clerk for a local council. His childhood friend Amanda, however, was a class above them. As a Chemical Engineer, her father wore starched cotton shirts while Eddie's father wore drip-dry poly-cotton shirts. Amanda's family banned Eddie from meeting her. Nevertheless, Eddie meets Amanda every nine and half years. The next time is as undergraduates, where Eddie notices her in a queue for more fashionable food than he is in the queue for. The next time is as fellow shoppers in a department store, as Eddie looks for formal wear for his marriage to Tanya. The next time he meets her is in much straitened circumstances. Downsized, jobless, and with only three dollars in his bank account, Eddie skips an appointment with Amanda - now an employment consultant - and ends up beaten unconscious protecting a friend of a now indigent man Eddie befriended while still solvent. Eddie's report on Amanda's father's smelter expansion was the reason Eddie was downsized. Amanda identifies Eddie from the appointment card he had in his shirt pocket.