The Great World is a remarkable novel of self-knowledge and of fall from innocence, of survival and witness. Absorbed by the twentieth-century history of Australian life, the novel focuses on the unlikely friendship of two men who meet as POWs of the Japanese during WWII: Digger Keen, and Vic Curran. For both men, war was supposed to be a testing ground of masculine and nationalist virtue. Instead, it becomes an ordeal that lays bare the painful reality which lies behind a nation's myth of itself.
“The rare serious novel that doesn't condescend to its characters, this book has a limpidity and an elliptical sense of time that save it from becoming a blockbuster-style epic—despite having some of that form's easy pleasures—and render it poetic.”—The New Yorker
WINNER
| 1991 Commonwealth Writers' Prize of Europe and South Asia
David Malouf is the author of eleven novels, as well as bountiful collections of stories, poetry, and opera libretti. He has won the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, the Commonwealth Writers' Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Award, the Prix Femina Étranger, and the Australia-Asia Literary Award; he has also been short-listed for the Man Booker Prize. He lives in Australia.
View titles by David Malouf
The Great World is a remarkable novel of self-knowledge and of fall from innocence, of survival and witness. Absorbed by the twentieth-century history of Australian life, the novel focuses on the unlikely friendship of two men who meet as POWs of the Japanese during WWII: Digger Keen, and Vic Curran. For both men, war was supposed to be a testing ground of masculine and nationalist virtue. Instead, it becomes an ordeal that lays bare the painful reality which lies behind a nation's myth of itself.
“The rare serious novel that doesn't condescend to its characters, this book has a limpidity and an elliptical sense of time that save it from becoming a blockbuster-style epic—despite having some of that form's easy pleasures—and render it poetic.”—The New Yorker
Awards
WINNER
| 1991 Commonwealth Writers' Prize of Europe and South Asia
David Malouf is the author of eleven novels, as well as bountiful collections of stories, poetry, and opera libretti. He has won the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, the Commonwealth Writers' Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Award, the Prix Femina Étranger, and the Australia-Asia Literary Award; he has also been short-listed for the Man Booker Prize. He lives in Australia.
View titles by David Malouf
