David Malouf is a celebrated Australian author whose works are distinguished by their profound psychological insights and elegant prose. His novels delve into themes of identity, memory, and the intricate connections between past and present. Through his poetry and fiction, he captures the beauty and fragility of human experience, often exploring the deep resonance between people and the landscapes they inhabit. Malouf's literary contribution is marked by intellectual depth and a poetic sensibility that invites readers to contemplation.
Born on a poor dairy farm in Queensland, Frank Harland's life is centred 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.
Paperback edition of the first collection of short stories by the internationally award-winning poet and novelist. First published in 1985, it was awarded that year's Vance Palmer Award for Fiction, one of the Victorian Premier's literary awards. The author's other works include TJohnno' and THarland's Half Acre'.
The Great World gives a voice to the Australian experience of war; of the young men who have enlisted to fight other people's battles. Ranging over 70 years of Australian life, it is a novel of self-knowledge and lost innocence, of survival and witness.
In the first century A.D., Publius Ovidius Naso, the most urbane and irreverent poet of imperial Rome, was banished to a remote village on the edge of the Black Sea. From these sparse facts, Malouf has fashioned an audacious and supremely moving novel. Marooned on the edge of the known world, exiled from his native tongue, Ovid depends on the kindness of barbarians who impale their dead and converse with the spirit world.Then he becomes the guardian of a still more savage creature, a feral child who has grown up among deer. What ensues is a luminous encounter between civilization and nature, as enacted by a poet who once cataloged the treacheries of love and a boy who slowly learns how to give it. A work of unusual intelligence and imagination, full of surprising images and insights...One of those rare books you end up underlining and copying out into notebooks and reading out loud to friends.--The New York Times Book Review
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 a down-to-earth woman stubbornly tries to keep her feet on the ground at Ayers Rock. Malouf's men and women are together but curiously alone, looking for something they seem to have missed, or missed out on, in life. Powerfully rooted in the heat and the dust of the vast Australian continent, this is a heartbreakingly beautiful and richly satisfying collection by a master storyteller, one of the great writers of our time.
Reimagining a pivotal narrative from Homer's "Iliad," the novel offers a fresh perspective on one of literature's most renowned stories. Award-winning author David Malouf, in his first novel in over ten years, delves into the themes of heroism, fate, and the human condition, breathing new life into classic characters and events. This retelling invites readers to explore the emotional depths and complexities of the original tale, enriching their understanding of its timeless significance.
Each house, like each place, has its own topography, its own lore. A complex history comes down to us, through household jokes and anecdotes, odd family habits, and irrational superstitions, that forever shapes what we see and the way in which we see it.Beginning with his childhood home, David Malouf moves on to show other landmarks in his life, and the way places and things create our private worlds. Written with humour and uncompromising intelligence, 12 Edmondstone Street is an unforgettable portrait of one man's life.
The year is 1827, and in a remote hut on the high plains of New South Wales, two strangers spend the night in talk.
A young boy caught in the conflict between early British settlers and native Aborigines witnesses the barbaric tensions that bedeviled the birth of a nation in this profound and mythical novel. A searing and magnificent picture of Australia at the moment of its foundation, with early settlers staking out their small patch of land and terrified by the harsh and alien continent. Focussing on the hostility between the early British inhabitants and the native Aborigines, "Remembering Bablyon" tells the tragic and compelling story of a boy who finds himself caught between the two worlds. Shot through with humour, and poetic intensity, Malouf's epic novel of epic scope is simple, compassionate and universal.
From the image of a small boy entranced by his mother's GI Escort, yet still hoping for the return of a father 'missing in action', to the portrait of an adult writer trying to piece together a defining image of his late father, these outstanding stories conjure up with sharp intensity the memories and events that make a man. These powerfully vivid stories range over more than a century of Australian life, from green tropical lushness to 'blacksoil country', from scrub and outback to city streets - evoking dark shadows beneath a bright sun, and lives shaped by the ghosts of history and the rhythms of unruly nature.
