The Edge of Bali

Published by A&R Imprint, 1992
ISBN 0 207 168997
Availability: re-issued in 1997 by ETT Imprint publishers (Sydney)
(Distributed by Tower Books, Australia)

“Inez Baranay’s The Edge of Bali is made up of three related short stories about three unrelated tourists - Nelson, Marla and Tyler… All three are searching, all unsure of whether they should really be in Bali or where they’ll go next: three examples of the mass of lemming-like lost souls who flock to the third world to look for meaning, religion, spirit, beauty - all the things that amid our wealth and technology of the modern world, we have lost. …This is a book of full of contemporary dilemmas, clearly and keenly expressed by Baranay’s’ characters. … The book is really about the phenomenon of tourism. … The questions raised by the book are fascinating and often unanswerable.”

- Australian Book Review, October 1992

“Nelson, a post-punk [Sydney] girl has returned to Kuta in the hope of reuniting with her Balinese boyfriend but finding their love was not really of the ‘true’ variety gets stuck into some desperate partying… Marla, a successful business woman goes to Bali well read in its culture: she distrusts “false ideologies: colonialism, orientalism, and tourism” but finds tranquillity and a handsome Balinese lover. Tyler, and American searching for a lost friend, is strangely mesmerised, perhaps poisoned by various Balinese magics, to find himself involved in tourist anti-tourist movement. …Baranay writes evocatively of the Bali landscape, raising serious questions within vivid description. New myths jostle with the old.

- The Sydney Morning Herald