Collected Short Stories

In this collection of short novels and stories, Patrick White explores the gulf - by turns funny and unbearably sad - between life's expectations and its realities. With immense understanding and compassion, he captures the longings that underlie the relationships of men and women, and the tender pathos of the heart's secrets.

About the Author

Patrick White was born in England in 1912. He was taken to Australia (where his father owned a sheep farm) when he was six months old, but educated in England, at Cheltenham College and King's College, Cambridge. He settled in London, when he wrote several unpublished novels, then served in the RAF during the war; he returned after the war to Australia. He became the most considerable figure in modern Australian literature, awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1973. The great poet of Australian landscape, he has turned its vast empty spaces into great mythic landscapes of the soul. His position as man of letters was controversial, provoked by his acerbic, unpredictable public statements and his belief that it is eccentric individuals who offer the only hope of salvation. Technically brilliant, he is one modern novelist to whom the oft-abused epithet 'visionary' can safely be applied. He died in September 1990.