In a sunlit piazza on an April morning, women throw buckets of water over the cobbles and men deliver trays of pastry to trattorie. In a barren room above, a fanatic watches, engaged in the details of his life's most important project: the assassination of one of Italy's most beloved men of letters. In this penetrating novella, David Malouf, the highly acclaimed Australian author and finalist for the Booker Prize, plumbs the darker uses of our passions. Weaving a dense tapestry of sensual observation and personal events of mythic importance, he re-creates the frighteningly fascinating...
In a sunlit piazza on an April morning, women throw buckets of water over the cobbles and men deliver trays of pastry to trattorie. In a barren room a...
The Great World is a remarkable novel of self-knowledge and of fall from innocence, of survival and witness. Absorbed by the twentieth-century history of Australian life, the novel focuses on the unlikely friendship of two men who meet as POWs of the Japanese during WWII: Digger Keen, and Vic Curran. For both men, war was supposed to be a testing ground of masculine and nationalist virtue. Instead, it becomes an ordeal that lays bare the painful reality which lies behind a nation's myth of itself. The rare serious novel that doesn't condescend to its characters, this book has a...
The Great World is a remarkable novel of self-knowledge and of fall from innocence, of survival and witness. Absorbed by the twentieth-century ...
Winner of the IMPAC Award and Booker Prize nominee In this rich and compelling novel, written in language of astonishing poise and resonance, one of Australia's greatest living writers gives and immensely powerful vision of human differences and eternal divisions.In the mid-1840s a thirteen-year-old British cabin boy, Gemmy Fairley, is cast ashore in the far north of Australia and taken in by aborigines. Sixteen years later he moves back into the world of Europeans, among hopeful yet terrified settlers who are staking out their small patch of home in an alien place. To them, Gemmy stands...
Winner of the IMPAC Award and Booker Prize nominee In this rich and compelling novel, written in language of astonishing poise and resonance, one ...
Born on a poor dairy farm in Queensland, Frank Harland's life is centered on his great artistic gift, his passionate love for his father and four brothers and his need to repossess, through a patch of land, his family's past. The story spans Frank's life; from before the First World War, through years as a swaggie in the Great Depression and Brisbane in the forties, to his retirement to a patch of Australian scrub where he at last takes possession of his dream. Harland's Half Acre tells how a man sets out to recover the land his ancestors discovered and then lost and how, in...
Born on a poor dairy farm in Queensland, Frank Harland's life is centered on his great artistic gift, his passionate love for his father and four brot...
In this shimmering work of imagination, one of Australia's most honored writers conjures a single still moment on the edge of the 20th century in which two unlikely people share a friendship. When Ashley Crowther returns to Australia to manage his father's property, he discovers a timeless landscape of kingfishers and ibises; he also meets Jim Saddler, the young woodsman who becomes Ashley's guide to his inheritance. Together they discard the differences of personality and class to enter a partnership of wonder. But when war breaks out in Europe, Jim and Ashley are drawn into obscene...
In this shimmering work of imagination, one of Australia's most honored writers conjures a single still moment on the edge of the 20th century in whic...
Patrick White's brilliant 1961 novel, set in an Australian suburb, intertwines four deeply different lives. An Aborigine artist, a Holocaust survivor, a beatific washerwoman, and a childlike heiress are each blessed--and stricken--with visionary experiences that may or may not allow them to transcend the machinations of their fellow men. Tender and lacerating, pure and profane, subtle and sweeping, Riders in the Chariot is one of the Nobel Prize winner's boldest books.
Patrick White's brilliant 1961 novel, set in an Australian suburb, intertwines four deeply different lives. An Aborigine artist, a Holocaust survivor,...
Silence was a deeply established tradition. Men used it as a form of self-protection; it saved those who had experienced the horrors of war from the emotional trauma of experiencing it all over again in the telling. And it saved women and children, back home, from the terrible knowledge of what they had seen and walked away from ... One result of this was that the men who had actually lived through Gallipoli and the trenches did not write about it.
In the century since the Gallipoli landing, Anzac Day has taken on a different tenor for each succeeding generation. Perceptively and...
Silence was a deeply established tradition. Men used it as a form of self-protection; it saved those who had experienced the horrors of war from th...
Australia's British inheritance is a paradox that has preoccupied much of Malouf's fiction, and now it gives rise to a brilliant essay exploring Australia's connection with our one-time 'mother-country'. Malouf ponders the strengths and weaknesses, the values and illusions of Australia's complex relationship with England.
Australia's British inheritance is a paradox that has preoccupied much of Malouf's fiction, and now it gives rise to a brilliant essay exploring Austr...