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The Living and the Dead

Paperback / softback

Main Details

Title The Living and the Dead
Authors and Contributors      By (author) Patrick White
Physical Properties
Format:Paperback / softback
Pages:368
Dimensions(mm): Height 198,Width 129
Category/GenreModern and contemporary fiction (post c 1945)
ISBN/Barcode 9780099324317
ClassificationsDewey:823
Audience
General

Publishing Details

Publisher Vintage Publishing
Imprint Vintage Classics
Publication Date 5 September 1996
Publication Country United Kingdom

Description

To hesitate on the edge of life or to plunge in and risk change -this is the dilemma explored in THE LIVING AND THE DEAD. Patrick White's second novel is set in thirties London and portrays the complex ebb and flow of relationships within the Standish family. Mrs Standish, ageing but still beautiful, is drawn into secret liaisons, while her daughter Eden experiments openly and impulsively with left-wing politics and love affairs. Only the son, Elyot, remains an aloof and scholarly observer - until dramatic events shock him into sudden self-knowledge.

Author Biography

Patrick White was born in England in 1912 and taken to Australia, where his father owned a sheep farm, when he was six months old. He was educated in England at Cheltenham college and King's College, Cambridge. He settled in London, where he wrote several unpublished novels, then served in the RAF during the war. He returned to Australia after the war. He became the most considerable figure in modern Australian literature, awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1973. The great poet of Australian landscape, he turned its vast empty spaces into great mythic landscapes of the soul. His position as a man of letters was controversial, provoked by his acerbic, unpredictable public statements and his belief that it is eccentric individuals who offer the only hope of salvation. He died in September 1990.

Reviews

Scene after scene is worked out with exactness and subtlety which no second-string novelist can scent, far less nail to paper * Daily Telegraph * An unmistably major writer who commands a scope, power and sheer technical skill which put other more ambitious novelists into the shade -- A. Alvarez Brilliant and masterful * Nation *