★Rights sold to North America and UK.
★This collection of essays describes Murnane’s youth in the 1950s, his debt to writers as unlike as Marcel Proust and Jack Kerouac, and his obsession with racehorses, grasslands and the Hungarian language.

This collection of essays leads the reader into the curious and eccentric imagination of Gerald Murnane, one of the masters of contemporary Australian writing, author of the classic novel The Plains, and winner of the Patrick White Literary Award.

Delicately argued, and finely written, they describe his dislocated youth in the suburbs of Melbourne and rural Victoria in the 1950s, his debt to writers as unlike as Adam Lindsay Gordon, Marcel Proust and Jack Kerouac, his obsession with racehorses and grasslands and the Hungarian language, and above all, his dedication to the worlds of significance that lie within, or just beyond, the familiar details of Australian life.

Gerald Murnane
Gerald Murnane was born in Melbourne in 1939. He is the author of eleven works of fiction, including Tamarisk Row, The Plains, Inland, Barley Patch, A History of Books, A Million Windows, and Border Districts, and a collection of essays, Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs. He is a recipient of an Emeritus Fellowship from the Australia Council, the Patrick White Literary Award, the Melbourne Prize for Literature, the Adelaide Festival Literature Award for Innovation and the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award. His last work of fiction, Border Districts, received the the 2018 Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Fiction, was shortlisted for the 2018 Miles Franklin Literary Award and the 2018 ALS Gold Medal, and longlisted for the 2018 Voss Literary Prize.