Three Dollars by Elliot Perlman (Faber, £6.99 in UK)

Australian Elliot Perlman's novel is all the more outstanding for being his first, and has already picked up major prizes. It's the story of a middle-class man growing to maturity during the years of the Australian recession and somehow slipping inexorably through all the nets. Eddie somehow finds himself at the age of 38 without a job, and with a wife, child, and three dollars. Perlman has created an unforgettable character in his portrait of a man from childhood to adulthood. This novel is about many things: the secrets and intimacies of a marriage; the way friendships between couples change over the years; the shifting place of money in a life and how the larger context of the political and economic decisions of the day impact on private lives. Above all, this is the story of the love between Eddie and his wife, Tanya, over a period of 20 years, from schoolgoers to late thirties. Perlman writes with sharp and tender clarity of the issues which divide them - Tanya's depression, her anxieties about her unfinished PhD; Eddie's undeclared worry about the future of his job - and which unite them: their daughter, their social principles and their love for each other. To read this novel is to be reminded of Larkin: "What will survive of us is love."