In this shimmering work of imagination, one of Australia's most honored writers conjures a single still moment on the edge of the 20th century in which two unlikely people share a friendship. When Ashley Crowther returns to Australia to manage his father's property, he discovers a timeless landscape of kingfishers and ibises; he also meets Jim Saddler, the young woodsman who becomes Ashley's guide to his inheritance. Together they discard the differences of personality and class to enter a partnership of wonder. But when war breaks out in Europe, Jim and Ashley are drawn into obscene enterprise of the trenches, where death falls from the sky and burrows out of the earth. In telling the story of these men, Fly Away Peter combines overwhelmingly sensual imagery with an unblinking consciousness of the worst that history can inflict to produce a novel of phosphorescent beauty.
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
In this shimmering work of imagination, one of Australia's most honored writers conjures a single still moment on the edge of the 20th century in which two unlikely people share a friendship. When Ashley Crowther returns to Australia to manage his father's property, he discovers a timeless landscape of kingfishers and ibises; he also meets Jim Saddler, the young woodsman who becomes Ashley's guide to his inheritance. Together they discard the differences of personality and class to enter a partnership of wonder. But when war breaks out in Europe, Jim and Ashley are drawn into obscene enterprise of the trenches, where death falls from the sky and burrows out of the earth. In telling the story of these men, Fly Away Peter combines overwhelmingly sensual imagery with an unblinking consciousness of the worst that history can inflict to produce a novel of phosphorescent beauty.
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
