Gerald Murnane

Adrian Sherd is a teenage boy in Melbourne of the 1950s—the last years before television and the family car changed suburbia forever. Earnest and isolated, tormented by his hormones and his religious devotion, Adrian dreams of elaborate orgies with American film stars, and of marrying his sweetheart and fathering 11 children by her. He even dreams a history of the...

What he had been searching for was not the perfect religious order but the perfect landscape… From that moment on he was a poet in search of his ideal landscape. Lost to the world for more than four decades, A Season on Earth is the essential link between two acknowledged masterpieces by Gerald Murnane: the lyrical account of boyhood in...

"Twenty years ago, when I first arrived on the plains, I kept my eyes open. I looked for anything in the landscape that seemed to hint at some elaborate meaning behind appearances." There is no book in Australian literature like The Plains. In the two decades since its first publication, this haunting novel has earned its status as a classic....

The major work of fiction in this collection, A History of Books, explores the relationship between reading and writing in twenty-nine sections, each of which begins with the memory of a book that has left an image in the writer's mind. The memory of the books themselves might have faded, but the images remain in their clarity and import -...

This new work of fiction by one of Australia's most highly regarded authors focuses on the importance of trust, and the possibility of betrayal, in storytelling as in life. It tests the relationship established between author and reader, and on occasions of intimacy, between child and parent, boyfriend and girlfriend, husband and wife. Murnane's fiction is woven from images, and...

Often mentioned as an author in contention for the Nobel Prize, Gerald Murnane is regarded by many as Australia's most innovative and important writer of fiction. Barley Patch, Murnane's first new work of fiction in fourteen years, was written after a period in which he had thought he would never write fiction again. Appropriately, the book begins with the question,...

Winner of the 2018 Prime Minister's Literary Award for Fiction A new work by a master of contemporary Australian fiction, highly regarded overseas but little-known here. Giramondo's publication of Border Districts, and the retrospective volume Collected Short Fiction (early next year) is a collaboration with the distinguished New York publisher Farrar Straus Giroux. Conceived as Gerald Murnane's last work of...

Definitive collection of the short fiction of an Australian master-storyteller who is in a league of his own. Released simultaneously with Farrar Straus Giroux's editions of Border Districts and Collected Short Fiction in New York, an event which is likely to get international media attention. This volume brings together Gerald Murnane's shorter works of fiction, most of which have been...

Landscape with Landscape is Gerald Murnane's fourth book, after The Plains, and his first collection of short fiction. When it was first published, thirty years ago, it was cruelly reviewed. 'I feel sorry for my fourth-eldest, which of all my book-children was the most brutally treated in its early years,' Murnane writes in his foreword to this new edition. In...

With Giramondo's publication of Barley Patch and A History of Books, Gerald Murnane has attracted renewed interest as a brilliant writer and Nobel Prize contender. First published 25 years ago, Inland is one of Murnane's most complex and rewarding works, a study of guilt, longing and regret rich in metaphysical insights. From his native district in the Melbourne suburb of...

Based on Murnane's own early years growing up in the Victorian country town of Bendigo, Tamarisk Row is an unsparing evocation of an impoverished Catholic childhood in the late 1940s. Originally published in 1974, and out of print for almost twenty years, Tamarisk Row is Murnane's first novel, and in many respects, his masterpiece. Not only because of its rich...

As a boy, Gerald Murnane became obsessed with horse racing. He had never ridden a horse, nor seen a race. Yet he was fascinated by photos of horse races in the Sporting Globe, and by the incantation of horses' names in radio broadcasts of races. Murnane discovered in these races more than he could find in religion or philosophy—they were...

This collection of essays leads into the eccentric imagination of Gerald Murnane, one of the masters of contemporary Australian writing.

Final work by internationally acclaimed Australian author Gerald Murnane, reflecting on his career as a writer, and the fifteen books which have led critics to praise him as 'a genius on the level of Beckett'. A book which will appeal equally to Murnane's legion of fans, and to those new to his work, attracted by his reputation as a truly...

Gerald Murnane turns to poetry at the end of his literary career, writing frank, disarming poems that traverse the rich span of his life. I esteem / above all poems or passages of prose / those that put a lump in my throat. - Gerald Murnane, 'The Darkling Thrush' Gerald Murnane, now in his eightieth year, began his writing career...