Murray Bail

Frank Delage, a middle-aged Australian, arrives in Vienna with the most daring of propositions. He has invented a revolutionary piano and means to market it to the grand old world of classical music. A chance meeting with one Amalia von Schalla brings new possibilities - a soiree, an introduction to her daughter Elisabeth, dinner with an avant-garde composer. But when the sheer audacity of his campaign dawns on him, he takes a slow boat home to the southern hemisphere. As it meanders through the Mediterranean and the Suez Canal, he is afforded ample time to reflect on tensions between the old world and the new. And, for all his travails, he is not going home empty-handed...

Il vient de Sydney. Il a conçu et fabriqué un nouveau piano. Cet instrument au son merveilleux et inédit pourrait intéresser l’Europe. La Traversée ou l’improbable odyssée d’un homme des Antipodes ve

Il vient de Sydney. Il a conçu et fabriqué un nouveau piano. Cet instrument au son merveilleux et inédit pourrait intéresser l’Europe. La Traversée ou l’improbable odyssée d’un homme des Antipodes ve

Lui. est insaisissable. Portrait presque anonyme dun personnage qui traverse le temps et les aléas d’une vie, de sa petite enfance et son adolescence à Adélaïde, en passant par Melbourne et Sydney,

Lui. est insaisissable. Portrait presque anonyme dun personnage qui traverse le temps et les aléas d’une vie, de sa petite enfance et son adolescence à Adélaïde, en passant par Melbourne et Sydney,

What are The Pages?On a family sheep station in the interior of Australia, a brother and sister work the property while their reclusive brother, Wesley Antill, spends years toiling away in one of the sheds, writing a philosophy.Now he has died. Erica, a philosopher, is sent from Sydney to appraise his work. Accompanying her is Sophie, who needs a distraction from a string of failed relationships. Her field is psychoanalysis. These two women, each with different views of the world, face a situation they have not experienced before, with surprising results.

A masterpiece. A novel of high seriousness and higher playfulness Michael Hulse, Spectator On a property in New South Wales, a man named Holland lives with his daughter, Ellen. As years pass and Ellen grows into a beautiful young woman, her father announces his decision: she will marry the first man who can name all the eucalypts, down to the last tree. As suitors clamber to meet Hollands challenge, Ellen encounters a strange young man among her fathers trees - a storyteller, with enchanting tales of faraway lands. Murray Bail is the warmest and quick-witted of storytellers. You will never forget what is at the heart of this book: one of the great and most surprising courtships in literature Michael Ondaatje

Superb and surprising new fiction is found in this major new collection from the Australian master.A man named Huebler decides to photograph everyone alive. A suburban father perches in his sons tree house to spy on his friends. A dentist recognises his estranged wife in a famous painting. The Seduction of My Sister tells of the increasingly bizarre events involving a boy and his sister when a new family moves in across the street. And in Camouflage, Eric Banerjee, an unassuming Adelaide piano tuner, is sent north to the centre of Australia in 1943 to make his contribution to the war effort. It is clear in all these remarkable stories that Murray Bail - already celebrated for his novels - has also extended the manifold possibilities of short fiction. Each of his stories creates a strange and fascinating new world, and none of them is easily forgotten. Bails work in this collection is deft, angular, and very entertaining; the mastery of his art is fully revealed with wry humour and haunting power.

Thirteen Australian package tourists set off around the world on the holiday of a lifetime. But as they trawl from country to country, through cities and round ever more obscure museums they find nothing as they expect it, least of all themselves. Homesickness is an enchanting novel: a wry, witty look at the ways people interact, a catalogue of comic digressions and tantalising information in which the world becomes a museum with no exhibit more bizarre than human nature itself.