The Fringe of Leaves

About the Novels

Patrick White THE AUNT’S STORY

With the death of her mother, middle-aged Theodora Goodman contemplates the desert of her life. Freed from the trammels of convention she leaves Australia for a European tour and becomes involved with the residents of a small French hotel. But creating other people’s lives, even in love and pity, can lead to madness. Her ability to reconcile joy and sorrow is an unbearable torture to her. On the journey home, Theodora finds there is little to choose between the reality of illusion and the illusion of reality. She looks for peace, even if it is beyond the borders of insanity …

‘Patrick White makes us care about human beings of all kinds who have themselves failed to learn to care, failed to break through the barriers of class and money and egotism and bitterness and playacting, who have never ceased to feel lost and alone. And he makes us care about them without ever sparing their frailties and follies a single lash of his supple, witty, forked tongue’

Angus Wilson, Observer

‘A tour de force of the most unexpecting kind’

Daily Telegraph

Patrick White THE EYE OF THE STORM

In the Sydney suburb of Centennial Park, three nurses, a housekeeper and a solicitor attend to Elizabeth Hunter as her son and daughter convene at her deathbed. But, in death as in life, Elizabeth remains a destructive force on those who surround her.

The Eye of the Storm is a savage exploration of family relationships-and the sharp undercurrents of love and hate, comedy and tragedy, which define them.

‘One seeks among debased superlatives for words that would convey the grandeur of The Eye of the Storm … its high intellect, its fidelity to our victories and confusions, its beauty and heroic maturity … every passage merits attention and gives satisfaction’

New York Times Book Review

‘In his major post-war novels, the pain and earnestness of the individual’s quest for ‘meaning and design’ can be felt more intensely than perhaps anywhere else in con temporary Western prose’

Sunday Times

Patrick White THE LIVING AND THE DEAD

Set in thirties London, The Living and the Dead portrays the complex ebb and flow of relationships within the Standish family. Mrs Standish, ageing but still beautiful, is drawn into secret liaisons, while her daughter Eden experiments openly with left-wing politics and love affairs. Only the son, Elyot, remains an aloof and scholarly observer-until dramatic developments shock him into sudden self-knowledge.

‘Scene after scene is worked out with exactness and subtlety which no second-string novelist can scent, far less nail to paper’

Daily Telegraph

‘An unmistakably major writer who commands a scope, power and sheer technical skill which put other more ambitious novelists into the shade’

A. Alvarez

‘Brilliant and masterful’

Nation

Patrick White RIDERS IN THE CHARIOT

Through the crumbling ruins of the once splendid Xanadu Miss Hare wanders, half-mad, yet seeming less alien among the encroaching wildlife than among the inhabitants of Sarsaparilla. In this wilderness she stumbles firstly upon a half-cast aborigine and then upon a Jewish refugee. They each place themselves in the care of a local washerwoman. Existing in a world of pervasive evil, all four have been independently damaged and discarded. Now in one shared vision they find themselves bound together, understanding the possibilities of redemption.

‘Stands out among contemporary novels like a cathedral surrounded by booths. Its forms, its impulse and its dedication to what is eternal all excite a comparison with religious architecture’

Sunday Times

‘This is a book which really defies review; for its analysable qualities are overwhelmed by those imponderables which make a work “great” in the untouchable sense. It must be read because, like Everest, “it is there” ’

Guardian

Patrick White THE SOLID MANDALA

In The Solid Mandala Patrick White draws a telling and touching portrait of twin brothers. Waldo is the competent man of reason, he sees himself as the superior intellect. Arthur, accepted as a half-wit, is the innocent, God’s fool, loving and outgoing in a blundering way. As they compete with and care for each other through half a century, their lives are inextricably intertwined-the two sides of man’s nature forming a totality.

‘He is more like Dostoevsky than Thomas Mann: his novels are maelstroms of the soul whose power resides in the nightmare detail which assails their protagonists. They testify to the beauty and contortion of the spirit as few others this century have done’

Sunday Telegraph

‘His most finished and powerful work’

Sunday Times

‘Wonderfully fresh and human … full of exhilarating energy and wit’

Saturday Review

Patrick White THE TREE OF MAN

Stan Parker, with only a horse and a dog for company, journeys to a remote scrubby patch of land that he has inherited in the Australian hills. When the land is cleared enough for a rudimentary house to be built, Stan brings to the wilderness his new wife Amy. Together they struggle to establish a home for themselves and their growing family. And together but essentially apart, they face everything from the domestic upheavals of birth and death to natural disasters. In this chronicle of simple lives in joy and sorrow Patrick White creates an evoca tive monument to human endurance.

‘His greatest novel, The Tree of Man is a tragic pastoral about the penitential struggle with nature in a grim Australian Eden’

Observer

‘The novel has unforgettable scenes, marvellous characters, wide ranges of mood, strikingly fresh imagery-all those ingredients which make a novel … become a permanent part of our memory’

Washington Post

Patrick White THE TWYBORN AFFAIR

Eddie Twyborn is bisexual and beautiful, the son of a judge and a drunken mother. With this androgynous hero-Eudoxia/Eddie/Eadith Twyborn-and through his search for identity, Patrick White takes us on a journey into the ambiguous landscapes, sexual, psychological and spiritual, of the human condition.

‘It challenges comparison with some of the world’s most bizarre masterpieces’

Isobel Murray, Financial Times

‘To read Patrick White … is to touch a source of power, to move through areas made new and fresh, to see men and women with a sharpened gaze’

Daily Telegraph

‘The one novelist at present at work in the English language who is indisputably possessed of genius’

Sunday Telegraph

Patrick White THE VIVISECTOR

Hurtle Duffield is incapable of loving anything except when he paints. The men and women who court him during his long life are, above all, the victims of his art. He is the vivisector, dissecting their weaknesses with cruel precision: his sister’s deformity, a grocer’s moonlight indiscretion and the passionate illusions of his mistress, Hero Pavloussi. Only the egocentric adolescent he sees as his spiritual child elicits from him a deeper, more treacherous emotion.

‘Probably his finest book … makes almost all other novels dealing with the life of an artist look trivial’

Sunday Times

‘Patrick White is, in the finest sense, a world novelist. His themes are catholic and complex and he pursues them with a single-minded energy and vision’

Robert Nye, Guardian

‘One of the great magicians of fiction … White’s scope is vast and his invention endless’

Angus Wilson, Observer

Patrick White VOSS

Set in nineteenth-century Australia, Voss is the story of the passion between an explorer and a naïve young woman. Although they have met only a few times, Voss and Laura are joined by overwhelming, obsessive feelings for each other. Voss sets out to cross the continent. As hardships, mutiny and betrayal whittle away his power to endure and to lead, his attachment to Laura gradually increases. Laura, waiting in Sydney, moves through the months of separation as if they were a dream and Voss the only reality.

From the careful delineation of Victorian society to the sensitive rendering of hidden love to the stark narrative of adventure in the Australian desert, Patrick White’s novel is a work of extraordinary power and virtuosity.

‘A work of genius … Voss has an epic quality, the ageless sense of power and pride of a man battling with his condition’

Observer

‘By far the most impressive novel I have read this year’

Walter Allen, New Statesman