Hokusai's Wave — Kenneth Graham

Hokusai's Great Wave, a painting glimpsed on a wall during a one-night stand in Greece looms over the novel, threatening both excitement and danger. In this story, two not-so-young lovers leave Australia to take up new lives and jobs in the north of England. Caught between social divisions and private infidelities, they thrash around in the preparations for an arts festival. He is an Australian, with memories of surfing on Bondi beach, she a Scot trying to throw off her bourgeois origins but as they drift apart, both find that it is easier to impose form and order on festival art than it is on their own lives.