The Great World: A novel (Vintage International) - Softcover

Malouf, David

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0679748369 ISBN 13: 9780679748366

Publisher: Random House Inc, 1993

Synopsis

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

About this title

Review

"It is this characteristic opposition which makes The Great World a truthful portrait of Australia. Sufferings and wrongs abound, but there is no dullness." (Independent)

"An example of how fiction may still be individual, honest and humanly truthful. Malouf's great talent is precisely for unmasking the epic or world-historical - for finding the human backing to history's all reflecting mirror" (The Times)

"Lucid and accessible. His most ambitious book so far" (Guardian)

"A truthful portait of Australia" (Independent on Sunday)

"A book of great stature with moral force and moral truth" (Times Literary Supplement)

Book Description

Winner of the Commonwealth Prize, this astonishing novel invites us on a journey far across time - covering some seventy years - and space - ranging across Australia - and deep into the human heart.

About this edition

• Publisher: Random House Inc
• Publication date: 1993
• ISBN 10: 0679748369
• ISBN 13: 9780679748366
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 340