Murray Bail was born in Adelaide in 1941. Homesickness, his first novel, won the National Book Award for Australian Literature and the Melbourne Age Book of the Year Award. Holden's Performance, first published in 1988, won the Vance Palmer Prize for Fiction. Eucalyptus was the winner of the Commonwealth Writers Prize and the Miles Franklin Literary Award. Murray Bail's non-fiction includes an acclaimed monograph on the work of the painter Ian Fairweather and Longhand, A Writer's Notebook.
‘A curious and intriguing novel of contraries, whose central theme
is the opposition between philosophy and psychology. Murray Bail
plays a laconic, self-concealing game, cunningly luring the reader
in to his interlinked stories...The spell is most powerfully cast
in the brilliant quiet skill of the writing, which can make the
world come alive on the page, as in this startling, one-paragraph
storm.’
*Hermione Lee, Guardian UK*
‘The most extraordinary piece of fiction published in this country
this year.’
*Monthly*
‘[An] extremely sophisticated novel of ideas…The novel’s structure
is a pattern of interleaved reflection, story and philosophical
speculation about love and being, grief and understanding…It is a
novel of questions, of irreconcilables, of eccentricity and of
elusive wisdom.’
*Sydney Morning Herald*
‘The Pages is a nicely written, wonderfully entertaining novel with
optional depths about the discoveries of an Australian who devotes
his adult life to an introspective search for truth. … Philosophy
is a big, difficult subject—there is none bigger—that Bail depicts
thoughtfully and with sympathetic humour.’
*Telegraph*
‘One of the finest and most sensitive meditations on the condition
of being I know of. At times the human condition is remarked in a
manner as finely observed as it is in the best of Rilke’s
prose.’
*Alex Miller, Age*
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