His other work includes the novels Homesickness, which was a joint winner of The Age Book of the Year in 1980, and Holden's Performance, another award-winner.

Laurie Clancy suggests that Bail is, with Peter Carey and Frank Moorhouse, one of the chief innovators in Australian short story writing, and that he was part of its revival in the 1970s.

[3] After early success with short fiction, Bail turned to the novel as a form commensurate with his vision of life's complexity, which emerges in all its perplexing intricacy in Homesickness.

This first novel describes the unscripted, global travels of a group of Australian tourists to diverse museums, real and imaginary.

His next book, Holden's Performance, dealt more overtly with issues of national identity and the diverse forces that shape individual character.

His later novels explored related issues in terms of a key binary: in Eucalyptus, these are empirical knowledge and imagination, in The Pages psychology and philosophy.

Bail prides himself, rightly, on being a novelist of ideas, who is determined to be audacious in his creations and to challenge reader expectations and complacency.