The Great World

Description

Winner of the Commonwealth Prize, this astonishing novel invites us on a journey far across time - covering some seventy years - and space - ranging across Australia - and deep into the human heart. Every city, town and village has its memorial to war. Nowhere are these more eloquent than in Australia, generations of whose young men have enlisted to fight other people's battles - from Gallipoli and the Somme to Malaya and Vietnam. In THE GREAT WORLD, his finest novel yet, David Malouf gives a voice to that experience. But THE GREAT WORLD is more than a novel of war. Ranging over seventy years of Australian life, from Sydney's teeming King's Cross to the tranquil backwaters of the Hawkesbury River, it is a remarkable novel of self-knowledge and lost innocence, of survival and witness.

David Malouf is the author Dream Stuff ('These stories are pearls,' Spectator) and of acclaimed novels including The Great World (winner of the Commonwealth Writers' Prize) and Remembering Babylon (shortlisted for the Booker Prize and winner of the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award).

It is this characteristic opposition which makes The Great World a truthful portrait of Australia. Sufferings and wrongs abound, but there is no dullness. * Independent * An example of how fiction may still be individual, honest and humanly truthful. Malouf's great talent is precisely for unmasking the epic or world-historical - for finding the human backing to history's all reflecting mirror * The Times * Lucid and accessible. His most ambitious book so far * Guardian * A truthful portait of Australia * Independent on Sunday * A book of great stature with moral force and moral truth * Times Literary Supplement *