The novel that put Australian literature on the map is now in a Vintage Classic editionSet 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. As hardships, mutiny and betrayal whittle away his power to endure and to lead, his attachment...

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 h...

One of Patrick White’s most loved novels in which he creates a memorable portrait of human resilienceStan Parker, with only a horse and a dog for companions, journeys to a remote scrubby patch of land that he has inherited in the Australian hills. When the land is cleared enough for a rudimentary house to be built, Stan brings his new wife, Amy, to the wilderness. Together they struggle to establish a home for themselves and their growing family.And together, but essentiall...

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...

Rejected by the 1962 Adeladie Festival Board of Governors as ‘unappetising fare’ - The Ham Funeral is now considered a modern classic.Set in a squalid British boarding house, the play tells the story of a young poet, who lodges with Mr and Mrs Lusty, a bloated, gluttonous pair. When her husband dies abruptly, Mrs Lusty announces a grand funeral featuring a lavish feast, in his honour. Driven by her incontinent appetite, she attempts to seduce the young poet, with comically...

Nobel Prize winner Patrick White's masterpiece, The Eye of the Storm, the basis for the film starring Charlotte Rampling, Judy Davies, and Geoffrey Rush.In White's 1973 classic, terrifying matriarch Elizabeth Hunter is facing death while her impatient children—Sir Basil, the celebrated actor, and Princess de Lascabane, an adoptive French aristocrat—wait. It is the dying mother who will command attention, and who in the midst of disaster will look into the ...

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.

A previously unpublished novel from the winner of the 1973 Nobel Prize for Literature. Two children are brought to a wild garden on the shores of Sydney Harbour to shelter from the Second World War. The boy's mother has died in the Blitz. The girl is the daughter of a Sydney woman and a Communist executed in a Greek prison. In wartime Australia, these two children form an extraordinary bond as they negotiate the dangers of life as strangers abandoned on the far side of the world. With the ...

The story of two people living one life from the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature.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 lo...

Eleven stories to which Patrick White brings his immense understanding of the urges which lie just beneath the facade of ordinary human relationships, especially those between men and women. A girl beset by her mother's influence, who marries her father's friend. . . A young man strangely moved into marriage with a girl like the mother who never understood him. . . A pretty market researcher who learns the ultimate details of love with a difference. . . The collector of bird-calls who unwi...

Patrick White's classic 1965 drama The Season at Sarsaparilla is 'a charade of suburbia', a play of shadows, rather than substance. The neighbours that populate the play are held by their environment, waiting with determination, but little expectation, for the inevitable cycle of birth, copulation and death.

This Patrick White masterpiece, now in a Vintage Classics editionHurtle Duffield, a painter, is incapable of loving anything except what he paints. The men and women who court him during his long life are, above all, the victims of his art. He is the vivisector, dissecting their weaknesses with cruel precision: his sister's deformity, a grocer's moonlight indiscretion, and the passionate illusions of his mistress Hero Pavloussi.It is only when Hurtle meets ...