Murray Bail

An elusive, elliptical, often beautiful thread of recollections and observations, He is not autobiography, or even memoir, but an almost anonymous portrait of a figure passing through time and circumstances. It begins with boyhood in suburban Adelaide after the war. As the narrator remembers the years, the focus shifts forward to the recent past and back again, often within the...

Eucalyptus is the 1999 winner of the Miles Franklin Award and the Commonwealth Writers Prize. On a property in western New South Wales, a man named Holland lives with his daughter, Ellen. Over the years, as she grows into a beautiful young woman, he plants hundreds of different gum trees on his land. When Ellen turns nineteen, her father announces...

Here, by the highly acclaimed and bestselling author of Eucalyptus, is the perfect gem of a Christmas gift. The brilliant title story Camouflage tells the story of Eric Banerjee, an Adelaide piano-tuner sent north to defend Australia in 1942. Accompanying it is one of Bail's masterly pieces of short fiction, The Seduction of My Sister, a weird and compelling account...

Holden's Performance is the sprawling tale of Holden Shadbolt, a guileless and matter-of-fact man, as he passes through the cities and landscapes of Australia. He follows the flamboyant people around him - ex-corporal Frank 'Bloodnut' McBee who woos Holden's mother; his uncle Vern, a shortsighted proofreader with a weakness for eating newspaper with his breakfast cereal; and the crippled artist...

It could almost have been their own country: these sections with the gums briefly framed like a traditional oil painting by the slowly passing window. The colours were as brown and parched; that chaff-coloured grass, Ah, this dun-coloured realism. Any minute now the cry of the crow or a cockatoo; but no. Thirteen men and women travel the world on...

At dawn, two women leave Sydney to drive over the Blue Mountains, into the dry outback landscape and the home of the late philosopher Wesley Antill. A man who thought his name too light for a philosopher, and his ears outlandish. Erica, a philosopher herself, has been asked by her university to review Wesley's work, to read his notes –...

Frank Delage, a piano manufacturer from Sydney, travels to Vienna, a city immersed in music, to present the Delage concert grand. He hopes to impress with its technical precision, an improvement on the old pianos of Europe. How could he not know his piano is all wrong for Vienna? Perhaps he should have tried Berlin. But a chance meeting with...