Patrick White

From the winner of the Nobel Prize for LiteratureSet in Australia in the 1840s, A Fringe of Leaves combines dramatic action with a finely distilled moral vision. Returning home to England from Van Diemen's land, the Bristol Maid is shipwrecked on the Queensland coast and Mrs Roxburgh is taken prisoner by a tribe of Australian Aboriginals, along with the rest of the passengers and crew. In the course of her escape, she is torn by conflicting loyalties - to her dead husband, to her rescuer, to her own and to her adoptive class.

Three short stories about the lives we make with the hands we're dealt. The Streak -- Harold Bishop shares his office and his life with no one, save the digits on the whiteboard that grow each day. The Traffickers -- Amal's life has never been easy, but over the course of one evening his past choices and fate conspire to drive him towards a life-or-death decision. The Law of Unintended Consequences -- Trevor Stillman doesn't know Roger Hallowell, but he hates him and everything he stands for. But will he have the courage to act on his convictions?

<p>Patrick White's magnificent debut novel - first published 1939, long out of print and now a Text Classic. Based on Patrick White's own experiences in the early 1930s as a jackaroo at Bolaro, near Adaminaby in south-eastern New South Wales, Happy Valley paints a portrait of a community in a desolate landscape. It is a jagged and restless study of small-town and country life. White was twenty-seven when Happy Valley was published by George C. Harrop in London. This mesmerising first novel gives us a prolonged glimpse of literary genius in the making. It won the Australian Literature Society Gold Medal in 1941, but White did not allow the novel to be republished in English in his lifetime. Its appearance now in the Text Classics series is a major literary event. Happy Valley is the missing piece in the extraordinary jigsaw of White's work. 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 and served in the RAF, before returning to Australia after the war. He was the first Australian to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, in 1973. He died in 1990. Peter Craven is one of Australia's best-known literary critics. He was founding editor of Scripsi, Quarterly Essay and the Best of anthologies. '[Patrick White] was a prophet, and from his sublime mountaintop, he sent down lightning bolts on our callow heads. Some of these bolts are vivid in Happy Valley, his first novel, published in 1939 and now reissued...The novel stands up well in the high company of its later brethren. It prefigures the greatness to come, and is a more adventurously wrought than many of our own age. White is a mesmerising narrator whose prose illuminates the most ordinary object and event in new and gripping ways.' Thomas Keneally, Guardian 'Happy Valley will be a joy for any fan. Here we see a sensibility not so much forming as finding, and owning, itself.' Weekend Australian 'This is a remarkable first novel, already discernible as the performance of a master whose apprentice work cannot be glimpsed. We are fortunate indeed that Text has reopened the front door in the house of Patrick White's fiction.' Canberra Times 'My favourite Australian novel was by a newcomer - well, a newcomer in 1939. A sardonic, grotesque, oddly moving ensemble of piece about thwarted lives in a dismal country town, Happy Valley presages the later Patrick White, but is also refreshingly original and feels as contemporary as the latest bestseller.' Jane Sullivan, Australian Book Review 'Happy Valley is a harsh and unsparing picture of a prematurely exhausting, life-denying Australia. It's a world full of violence, adultery and financial ruin, in which nothing will ever change. White's main focus, as in his great later novels, is the thwarted spiritual yearning of his characters. But this is also a superb anatomy of Australian society.' Metro (NZ)</p> <p>The first novel by Australia's only Nobel Prize winner for literature, which has been out of print for more than 70 years. </p><p>Originally published in 1939, <i>Happy Valley</i> is set in a small country town in the Snowy Mountains. </p><p>Based on Patrick White&#x2019;s own experiences in the early 1930s as a jackaroo at Bolaro, near Adaminaby in south-eastern New South Wales, <i>Happy Valley</i> paints a portrait of a community in a desolate landscape. It is a jagged and restless study of small-town and country life.&#x00a0;</p><p>White was twenty-seven when <i>Happy Valley </i>was published by George C. Harrop in London. This mesmerising first novel gives us a prolonged glimpse of literary genius in the making. It won the Australian Literature Society Gold Medal in 1941, but White did not allow the novel to be republished in English in his lifetime. Its appearance now in the Text Classics series, with an introduction by Peter Craven, is a major literary...

<p>WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY DAVID MALOUF</p><p></p><p>Through the crumbling ruins of the once splendid Xanadu, Miss Hare wanders, half-mad. In the wilderness she stumbles upon an Aborigine artist and a Jewish refugee. They place themselves in the care of a local washerwoman. In a world of pervasive evil, all four have been independently damaged and discarded. Now in one shared vision they find themselves bound together, understanding the possibility of redemption.</p> <p>WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY DAVID MALOUFThrough the crumbling ruins of the once splendid Xanadu, Miss Hare wanders, half-mad. In the wilderness she stumbles upon an Aborigine artist and a Jewish refugee. They place themselves in the care of a local washerwoman. In a world of pervasive evil, all four have been independently damaged and discarded. Now in one shared vision they find themselves bound together, understanding the possibility of redemption.</p> <div><h3>Product Description</h3><p>This novel portrays four people - a half-mad heiress, a washer-woman, a Jewish refugee and a mixed-race Aborigine - who mystically share a vision of the divine. The ways in which each of these people touches the lives of those who would destroy the vision is the heart of this story. </p><h3>About the Author</h3><p>PATRICK WHITE (1912–1990) was born in London and traveled to Sydney with his Australian parents six months later. White was a solitary, precocious, asthmatic child and at thirteen was sent to an English boarding school, a miserable experience. At eighteen he returned to Australia and worked as a jackaroo on an isolated sheep station. Two years later, he went up to Cambridge, settling afterwards in London, where he published his first two books. White joined the RAF in 1940 and served as an intelligence officer in the Middle East. At war’s end, he and his partner, Manoly Lascaris, bought an old house in a Sydney suburb, where they lived with their four Schnauzers. For the next eighteen years, the two men farmed their six acres while White worked on some of his finest novels, including <em>The Tree of Man</em> (1955), <em>Voss</em> (1957), and <em>Riders in the Chariot</em> (1961). When he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1973, he did not attend the ceremony but, with his takings and some of his own money, created an award to help older writers who hadn’t received their due: the first recipient was Christina Stead. Late in life, when asked for a list of his loves, White responded: "Silence, the company of friends, unexpected honesty, reading, going to the pictures, dreams, uncluttered landscapes, city streets, faces, good food, cooking small meals, whisky, sex, pugs, the thought of an Australian republic, my ashes floating off at last." </p> </div>

From Australia's first Nobel Prize-winning author. With the death of her mother, middle-aged Theodora Goodman contemplates the desert of her life. Freed from the trammels of convention, she leaves Australia for a European tour and becomes involved with the residents of a small French hotel. But creating other people's lives, even in love and pity, can lead to madness. Her ability to reconcile joy and sorrow is an unbearable torture to her. On the journey home, Theodora finds there is little to choose between the reality of illusion and the illusion of reality. She looks for peace, even if it is beyond the borders of insanity.

A savage exploration of family relationships from the Nobel Prize-winning Patrick WhiteElizabeth Hunter, an ex-socialite in her eighties, has a mystical experience during a summer storm in Sydney which transforms all her relationships: her existence becomes charged with a meaning which communicates itself to those around her. From this simple scenario Patrick White unfurls a monumental exploration of the tides of love and hate, comedy and tragedy, impotence and and longing that fester within family relationships. In the Sydney suburb of Centennial Park, three nurses, a housekeeper and a solicitor attend to Elizabeth as her son and daughter convene at her deathbed. But, in death as in life, Elizabeth remains a destructive force on those who surround her. The Eye of The Storm is a savage exploration of family relationships - and the sharp undercurrents of love and hate, comedy and tragedy, which define them.

"Indisputably one of the century's greatest writers. " —Annie Proulx"The Hanging Garden is a novel for our time--a story about parentless children, mistreated by a world that, by its lights, intends no harm but nonetheless does enduring damage. " —The New York Times Book Review (cover review, 05/26/13)From the Nobel Prize–winning author of The Eye of the Storm comes a vivid, visceral tale of childhood friendship and sexual awakening from beyond the echoes of World War II.Sydney, Australia, 1942. Two children, on the cusp of adolescence, have been spirited away from the war in Europe and given shelter in a house on Neutral Bay, taken in by the charity of an old widow who wants little to do with them. The boy, Gilbert, has escaped the Blitz. The girl, Eirene, lost her father in a Greek prison. Left to their own devices, the children forge a friendship of startling honesty, forming a bond of uncommon complexity that they sense will shape their destinies for years to come. Patrick White's posthumously discovered novel, The Hanging Garden, which represents the first part of what was intended to be his final masterpiece, is a breathtaking and important literary event. Seamlessly shifting among points of view, and written in dazzling prose, Patrick White's mastery of style and highly inventive storytelling will transport you as the work of few writers can.

This is the story of two people living one life. Arthur and Waldo Brown were born twins and destined never to to grow away from each other. They spent their childhood together. Their youth together. Middle-age together. Retirement together. They even shared the same girl. They shared everything - except their view of things. Waldo, with his intelligence, saw everything and understood little. Arthur was the fool who didn't bother to look. He understood. This is the story of two people living one life. Arthur and Waldo Brown were born twins and destined never to to grow away from each other. They spent their childhood together. Their youth together. Middle-age together. Retirement together. They even shared the same girl. They shared everything - except their view of things. Waldo, with his intelligence, saw everything and understood little. Arthur was the fool who didn't bother to look. He understood.

Stan Parker, with only a horse and a dog for company journeys to a remote patch of land he has inherited in the Australian hills. Once the land is cleared and a rudimentary house built, he brings his wife Amy to the wilderness. Together they face lives of joy and sorrow as they struggle against the environment.

First published in 1979, this is the second-last novel published by the only Australian to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. The sexually ambiguous Eddie Twyborn is encountered in three stages of his life - as Eudoxia, the lover of an elderly Greek man; as Eddie, a jackeroo in the Australian outback; and as Eadith, the madam of a high-class London brothel. This is a paperback reprint in the 'Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics' series.

**Join J. M. Coetzee and Thomas Keneally in rediscovering Nobel Laureate Patrick White** Hurtle Duffield, a painter, coldly dissects the weaknesses of any and all who enter his circle. His sister's deformity, a grocer's moonlight indiscretion, the passionate illusions of the women who love him-all are used as fodder for his art. It is only when Hurtle meets an egocentric adolescent whom he sees as his spiritual child does he experience a deeper, more treacherous emotion in this tour de force of sexual and psychological menace that sheds brutally honest light on the creative experience. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators. ** ### Review "One of the great magicians of fiction . . . White's scope is vast and his invention endless." -_The Observer_ (London) ### Product Description Hurtle Duffield, a painter, coldly dissects the weaknesses of any and all who enter his circle. His sister's deformity, a grocer's moonlight indiscretion, the passionate illusions of the women who love him-all are used as fodder for his art. It is only when Hurtle meets an egocentric adolescent whom he sees as his spiritual child does he experience a deeper, more treacherous emotion in this tour de force of sexual and psychological menace that sheds brutally honest light on the creative experience. Join J. M. Coetzee and Thomas Keneally in rediscovering Nobel Laureate Patrick WhiteHurtle Duffield, a painter, coldly dissects the weaknesses of any and all who enter his circle. His sister's deformity, a grocer's moonlight indiscretion, the passionate illusions of the women who love him-all are used as fodder for his art. It is only when Hurtle meets an egocentric adolescent whom he sees as his spiritual child does he experience a deeper, more treacherous emotion in this tour de force of sexual and psychological menace that sheds brutally honest light on the creative experience. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY ROBERT MACFARLANESet in nineteenth-century Australia, Voss is the story of the secret passion between an explorer and a naïve young woman. Although they have met only a few times, Voss and Laura are joined by overwhelming, obsessive feelings for each other. Voss sets out to cross the continent, and as hardships, mutiny and betrayal whittle away his power to endure and to lead, his attachment to Laura gradually increases. Laura, waiting in Sydney, moves through the months of separation as if they were a dream and Voss the only reality.