A Season On Earth

Gerald Murnane was born in Melbourne in 1939. He has been a primary teacher, an editor and a university lecturer. His debut novel, Tamarisk Row (1974), was followed by ten other works of fiction, including The Plains and most recently Border Districts. In 1999 Murnane won the Patrick White Award and in 2009 he won the Melbourne Prize for Literature. He lives in western Victoria.

`A Season on Earth recalls us to the truth that Murnane's avant-gardism emerges out of a resolutely conventional soul...Now that [the novel's] excised half has been returned, we're granted a fuller sense of Murnane's original aims...The comedy here is no less wicked in deployment, but the edge is sharpened...Ludicrous and hectic as [Adrian] Sherd's casting around for some stable sense of self may be, there is something moving in the efforts he makes...We see an artist inventing himself from scratch...[By the end] Sherd has not yet pinpointed those regions his mature art would explore. What he has learned is that they lie somewhere in the inland empire of his imagination.' * Monthly * `Gerald Murnane seems to be winning the wider regard his devotees have always known he deserved...A Season on Earth is more like other novels, or more like a novel, than the fictions to come, but Murnane is already determined to make his own forms...[It is] not simply an idiosyncratic take on the Australian Catholic upbringing, but a portrait of an artist as a young man, in which one false vocation has to die so that a true vocation can take its place.' * Age * `Murnane's early writing, as shown here, is accessible and often humorous in his own dry way...A Season on Earth could be recommended as an ideal jumping-off point for readers new to Murnane and his particular way of looking at the world.' * Books + Publishing * `Murnane is quite simply one of the finest writers we have produced.' * Peter Craven * `Murnane, a genius, is a worthy heir to Beckett.' * Teju Cole * 'This is a lengthy work, yet not one word is wasted...worth the wait.' * Herald Sun * `Reading Murnane, one cares less about what is happening in the story and more about what one is thinking about as one reads. The effect of his writing is to induce images in the reader's own mind, and to hold the reader inside a world in which the reader is at every turn encouraged to turn his or her attention to those fast flocking images.' * New York Times *