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.
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.
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.
Antipodes is a stunning collection of stories which pinpoint the contrast between the old world and the new, between youth and age, love and hatred and even life and death itself. . . This debut collection from David Malouf, now one of Australia's most highly acclaimed and popular authors, won the Victorian Premier's Literary Award and the Vance Palmer Award and established Malouf's reputation as one of the great writers of contemporary Australian fiction.
In the late afternoon of a day in February, that hottest of Australian summer months, when a brutal sun stood bronze above the river flats which you may see from the dormitory windows of Chatterton, Charles came to the school with his mother, walking from the railway station to the gates by a private path across a burnt, untidy field, overhung with Cape lilacs that still drooped, dusty and melancholy...In the lower part of his belly fear kicked and pulsed like a child in the womb, ready to be born. Fifteen-year-old Charles Fox is sent away to boarding school, innocent, alone and afraid. There one of his masters develops an intense attachment to him. But when Charles meets Margaret, a girl staying at a nearby farm for the holidays, he is besotted, and a passionate, unforgettable romance begins. Published in London in 1937 to wide acclaim, The Young Desire It is a stunning debut novel about coming of age: an intimate and lyrical account of first love, and a rich evocation of rural Western Australia. It won the Australian Literature Society Gold Medal, and is now back in print for the first time in years with a new introduction by David Malouf.
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.
The year is 1827, and in a remote hut on the high plains of New South Wales, two strangers spend the night in talk.
The story of a white man, who after sixteen years with aborigines, finds his whiteness as unsettling among the hostilities of a pioneer community as the knowledge he brings with him of the aboriginal world.__
