Alex Miller is well known in Australia, but less so in the UK. Lovesong (Allen & Unwin, £12.99) may be about to change that. It is apparently born from Miller’s own experiences living as a writer in Paris in the 1970s. He obviously holds the city in great affection and has a deep understanding of the yearning for home — and of the love that can prevent a man from giving in to that yearning. Miller’s hero, John Patterner, meets beautiful Tunisian waitress Sabiha by chance one day and is seduced by her beauty, her fragrant cooking and the warm welcome of the North African café that she runs with her widowed aunt.

Their love story is tender, tragic, uplifting and complex, affected by culture and loyalty, the pull of home and Sabiha’s all-consuming longing for a child. Miller’s prose is sensual and evocative, deserving to be savoured and yet the tension that he generates is such that I found myself skim-reading whole passages, desperate to discover whether Sabiha acts on her inner thoughts.

Miller shows us the most private torments and moral wrangling of his characters with intelligence and compassion. A second thread in the book also addresses a moral issue. Years later, back in Melbourne, John Patterner recounts his story to our narrator, a semi-retired novelist called Ken. But does this telling imply that he makes a gift of his story? Or does he have the right to expect that the tale will remain his own?