Hurtle Duffield 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 an egocentric adolescent whom he sees as his spiritual child does he experience a deeper, more treacherous em...

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.

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...

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, mo...

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.Patrick White died before his novel could be completed, leaving behind a masterpiece in t...

Set 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 aborigines, 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.

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...

The appearance of this self-portrait by Patrick White is a literary event for which his readers and admirers have long hoped. He explains how on the very rare occasions when he re-reads a passage from one of his books, he recognizes very little of the self he knows. This ‘unknown’ is the man who interviewers and visiting students expect to find, but ‘unable to produce him’, he prefers to remain private – or as private as anyone who has been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature can ever b...

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.

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.

Eddie Twyborn is bisexual and beautiful, the son of a Judge and a drunken mother. With his androgynous hero - Eudoxia/Eddie/Eadith Twyborn - and through his search for identity, for self-affirmation and love in its many forms, Patrick White takes us into the ambiguous landscapes, sexual, psychological and spiritual, of the human condition.