Bookish boys and taciturn men, strong women and wayward sons, fathers and daughters, lovers and husbands, a composer and his muse, a builder-architect and his legacy u here are their stories, whole lives brought vividly into focus and so powerfully rooted in the landscape that you can almost feel the heat and the dust. His canvas is the vast Australian continent from the mysterious, glittering Valley of Lagoons behind the Great Divide in Far North Queensland, to bohemian Balmain and the Centre at Uluru, but always there are enticing glimpses of a world beyond, and the stories are tender, subtle, unsettlingly intimate. A young man going off to war tries to make sense of his place in the world he is leaving; a composer's life plays itself out as a complex domestic cantata; an accident on a hunting trip speaks volumes, which its inarticulate victim never could; and, in the funniest, most surprising story of all, a down-to-earth woman stubbornly tries to keep her feet on the ground at Ayers Rock. Malouf'smen and women are together but curiously alone, looking for something they seem to have missed, or missed out on, in life, puzzling over the space they'll leave behind when the waters close over them a This is a heartbreakingly beautiful, richly satisfying collection by a master storyteller, one of the great writers of our time.
About the Author
David Malouf is the internationally acclaimed author of novels including The Great World, winner of the Commonwealth Writers' prize and the Prix Femina Etranger, Remembering Babylon, shortlisted for the Booker Prize and winner of the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, An Imaginary Life, Conversations at Curlow Creek, Dream Stuff Every Move You Make, his autobiographical classic 12 Edmondstone Street and Ransom. His Collected Stories won the 2008 Australia-Asia Literary Award. He was born in 1934 and was brought up in Brisbane and now lives in Sydney.
Industry Reviews
Rare and luminous talent...an outstanding collection -- Jem Poster * Guardian *
Contemporary Australia lives and breathes, shudders, groans and even scratches without a trace of inhibition throughout these seven vivid narratives from one of the finest of contemporary writers * Irish Times *
Graceful and unsettling... Malouf's prose is invariably elegant -- David Flusfeder * Financial Times *
A master of the incisive, seamless, turns-on-a-sixpence short story...this collection is a jewel -- Kate Saunders * The Times *
Tender and luminous tales...It is his rich landscapes for which Malouf is most often praised and this collection contains some of the most evocative descriptions of the Australian continent -- Chitra Ramaswamy * Scotland on Sunday *
