Nine brilliant pieces of gender-bending fiction

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Reading lists

9 brilliant pieces of gender bending fiction

Voss

Hidden love and adventure in the Australian desert - a novel of extraordinary power and virtuosity

The scenery is wonderfully described by the author… There is an interesting spiritual symmetry between the decline in fate of Voss and the circumstances in which Laura finds herself

One of the greatest magicians of fiction ... White's scope is vast and his invention endless

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

The outstanding figure in Australian fiction

Patrick White was born in England in 1912 and taken to Australia, where his father owned a sheep farm, when he was six months old. He was educated in England at Cheltenham college and King's College, Cambridge. He settled in London, where he wrote several unpublished novels, then served in the RAF during the war. He returned to Australia after the war. 
He became the most considerable figure in modern Australian literature, awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1973. The great poet of Australian landscape, he turned its vast empty spaces into great mythic landscapes of the soul. His position as a man of letters was controversial, provoked by his acerbic, unpredictable public statements and his belief that it is eccentric individuals who offer the only hope of salvation. He died in September 1990.

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY ROBERT MACFARLANE 
 
Set in nineteenth-century Australia, Voss is the story of the secret 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, and 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.

Riders in the Chariot

A bold, visionary story of four intertwining lives from the Nobel prizewinning novelist

[A] monumental work [of more than] half a thousand pages -- almost every one of which cries out for quotation

Riders in the Chariot is the most compassionate and the most beautiful of all Patrick White’s works; colours fly everywhere; his words, comic, ecstatic, are like the brushstrokes on a canvas

The Modern Library: The 200 Best Novels in English Since 1950

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'.

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

Patrick White (Author) Patrick White was born in England in 1912 and taken to Australia, where his father owned a sheep farm, when he was six months old. He was educated in England at Cheltenham college and King's College, Cambridge. He settled in London, where he wrote several unpublished novels, then served in the RAF during the war. He returned to Australia after the war. 
He became the most considerable figure in modern Australian literature, awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1973. The great poet of Australian landscape, he turned its vast empty spaces into great mythic landscapes of the soul. His position as a man of letters was controversial, provoked by his acerbic, unpredictable public statements and his belief that it is eccentric individuals who offer the only hope of salvation. He died in September 1990. David Malouf (Introducer) David Malouf is the internationally acclaimed author of novels including The Great World (winner of the Commonwealth Writers' prize and the Prix Femina Etranger), Remembering Babylon (shortlisted for the Booker Prize and winner of the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award), An Imaginary Life, Conversations at Curlow Creek, Dream Stuff ('These stories are pearls' Spectator), Every Move You Make ('Rare and luminous talent' Guardian), his autobiographical classic 12 Edmondstone Street and Ransom. His Collected Stories won the 2008 Australia-Asia Literary Award. In 2008 Malouf was the Scottish Arts' Council Muriel Spark International Fellow. He was born in 1934 and was brought up in Brisbane.

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY DAVID MALOUF 
 
Through the crumbling ruins of the once splendid Xanadu, Miss Hare wanders, half-mad. In the wilderness she stumbles upon an Aborigine artist and a Jewish refugee. They place themselves in the care of a local washerwoman. 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 possibility of redemption.

The Hanging Garden

Two children negotiate the dangers of life as World War Two evacuees in this unfinished novel from the Nobel Prize-winning Patrick White, published for the first time in 2012

It is frustrating and tantalising that The Hanging Garden is left, well, hanging

[A] coherent and polished read, shrewd and tender about its two protagonists... Arresting.

What is instantly apparent is White's mastery of his art. He does what so many other writers ought to be able to do easily but often can't, which is set a scene economically and vividly.

Patrick White was born in England in 1912. His Australian parents took him home when he was six months old but educated him in England, at Cheltenham College and King's College, Cambridge. He settled in London, where his first novel, Happy Valley, was published to some acclaim in 1939. After serving in the RAF during the Second World War he returned to Australia with his partner, Manoly Lascaris. The novels, short stories and plays that followed The Tree of Man in 1956 made White a considerable figure in world literature. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1973. The Hanging Garden was begun and put aside in 1981 when White was lured away to write once again for the theatre. The unfinished novel was found among his papers after his death in September 1990.

Two children are brought to a wild garden on the shores of Sydney Harbour to shelter from the Second World War. The boy's mother has died in the Blitz. The girl is the daughter of a Sydney woman and a Communist executed in a Greek prison. In wartime Australia, these two children form an extraordinary bond as they negotiate the dangers of life as strangers abandoned on the far side of the world. 
 
Patrick White died before his novel could be completed, leaving behind a masterpiece in the making.

Happy Valley

Patrick White’s long-suppressed first novel, published for the first time in seventy-three years.

Patrick White was born in England in 1912. His Australian parents took him home when he was six months old but educated him in England at Cheltenham College and King’s College, Cambridge. He settled in London, where Happy Valley was published to some acclaim in 1939. After serving in the RAF during the Second World War he returned to Australia with his partner, Manoly Lascaris. The novels, short stories and plays that followed The Tree of Man in 1956 made White a considerable figure in world literature. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1973. The Hanging Garden, an unfinished novel he put aside in 1981, was found among his papers after his death in 1990 and published by Cape in 2012. 
 
Introduction by Peter Craven.

Happy Valley is Patrick White’s first novel, published in London in 1939 when White was twenty-seven. It was praised by, among others, Graham Greene and Elizabeth Bowen, and won the Australian Literature Gold Medal in 1941, but, fearing that he had libelled one of the families portrayed in the novel, White did not allow the novel to be republished in English in his lifetime. 
 
Happy Valley is a place of dreams and secrets, of snow and ice and wind. In this remote little town, perched in its landscape of desolate beauty, everybody has a story to tell about loss and longing and loneliness, about their passion to escape. I must get away, thinks Dr Oliver Halliday, thinks Alys Browne, thinks Sidney Furlow. But Happy Valley is not a place that can be easily left, and White’s vivid characters, with their distinctive voices, move bit by bit towards sorrow and acceptance.

A Self Portrait

Flaws In The Glass

Patrick White was born in England in 1912 and taken to Australia, where his father owned a sheep farm, when he was six months old. He was educated in England at Cheltenham college and King's College, Cambridge. He settled in London, where he wrote several unpublished novels, then served in the RAF during the war. He returned to Australia after the war. 
 
He became the most considerable figure in modern Australian literature, awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1973. The great poet of Australian landscape, he turned its vast empty spaces into great mythic landscapes of the soul. His position as a man of letters was controversial, provoked by his acerbic, unpredictable public statements and his belief that it is eccentric individuals who offer the only hope of salvation. He died in September 1990.

The appearance of this self-portrait by Patrick White is a literary event for which his readers and admirers have long hoped. He explains how on the very rare occasions when he re-reads a passage from one of his books, he recognizes very little of the self he knows. This ‘unknown’ is the man who interviewers and visiting students expect to find, but ‘unable to produce him’, he prefers to remain private – or as private as anyone who has been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature can ever be. But in this book is the self Patrick White does recognize, the one he sees reflected in the glass. 
 
It is a remarkable book. In a shifting sequence we learn of youth in Australia; the ‘expensive prison’, his English boarding school; Cambridge with holiday trips to Germany; London in the Blitz; RAF wartime intelligence and compensations of life in Australia. There are journeys to cities and landscapes round the world which take on more reality than places one has actually visited. 
 
He tells us whom he has loved and hated and of his opinions – political and literary. He introduces us to a host of characters from Australian cousins to Stravinsky and Queen Elizabeth – and of course to Manoly Lascaris, who in 1942 ‘became the central mandala in my life’s hitherto messy design.’ He describes what he sees in the glass’s reflection with such power that it seems no artist can have attempted or executed a self-portrait so lifelike before.

White creates both a spellbinding tale and a myth for our time. Beautiful hardback edition of this classic.

Patrick White is a rare and colossal talent of world stature, and the only Australian writer to have won the Nobel Prize. Thomas Keneally, who owed him no favours, justly said: ‘On his day, White is better than Faulkner.’ White is the recipient of the only fan letter Salman Rushdie admits to having written to another author. He towers over the Australian literary landscape as does Goethe over German literature: lonely, vast, unique. He is not particularly difficult or tricksy, like his peers Nabokov or Beckett. His fiction is rooted in, and nourished by, the epic dramas of the great nineteenth-century/early twentieth-century authors like Thomas Hardy and D. H. Lawrence. He is both exciting and moving, understands women as few male novelists do, and addresses universal themes in a prose that is entirely and compellingly his own.

Voss describes an epic journey, both physical and spiritual. The eponymous hero, Johann Voss, is based on Ludwig Leichhardt, the nineteenth-century German explorer and naturalist who had already conducted several major expeditions into the Australian outback before making an ambitious attempt to cross the entire continent from east to west in 1848. He never returned. 
White re-imagines his story with visionary intensity. Voss’s last journey across the desert and the waterlogged plains of central Australia is a true ‘venture to the interior’. But Voss is also a love story, for the explorer has become inextricably bound up with Laura Trevellyn, whose inner life, like his own, is at odds with the world. In language poetic and passionate, yet at the same time grounded by shrewd, often comic, social observations and naturalistic portrayals of a wide variety of characters – farmers, convicts, aborigines, the colonial middle class and their servants.

Patrick White Speaks

In his new extrovert role he has ripped off his gilded mask of literature to reveal a savage streak

Patrick White has written novels, short stories and plays, including Voss, Riders in the Chariot, The Vivisector, The Twyborn Affair and, most recently, Three Uneasy Pieces. In 1973 he received the Nobel Prize for Literature.

This collection of speeches by the Australian Nobel prize-winning author have provoked extreme reactions in Australia. While members of the establishment and parts of the media have dismissed him as a bitter old man, the young and needy have responded to him with something close to adulation.

Three Uneasy Pieces

White's writing is curiously inviting as well as dreamlike

Patrick White received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1973. His novels include The Tree of Man, Voss, The Vivisector, A Fringe of Leaves, The Twyborn Affair and most recently Memoirs of Many in One.

In this book the author addresses the problem of growing old and the "warts of the soul" which, if gouged out, ruin the flesh. We must wait, he says, for the evil in us to die naturally. Presenting a peeled potato, a dance in the kitchen and a visit to the aged mother of a childhood friend, he considers our struggle, our efforts to achieve aesthetic perfection and suggests some resolutions. Patrick White is a Nobel Prize-winning author. His novels include "The Tree of Man", "Voss", "The Vivisector", "A Fringe of Leaves", "The Twyborn Affair" and "Memoirs of Many in One".

A Fringe of Leaves

Set in Australia in the 1840s, A FRINGE OF LEAVES combines dramatic action with a finely distilled moral vision. Returning home to England from Van Diemen's land, the Bristol Maid is shipwrecked on the Queensland coast and Mrs Roxburgh is taken prisoner by a tribe of aborigines, along with the rest of the passengers and crew. In the course of her escape, she is torn by conflicting loyalties - to her dead husband, to her rescuer, to her own and to her adoptive class.

Collected Short Stories

In this collection of short novels and stories, Patrick White explores the gulf - by turns funny and unbearably sad - between life's expectations and its realities. With immense understanding and compassion, he captures the longings that underlie the relationships of men and women, and the tender pathos of the heart's secrets.

Flaws in the Glass

In this remarkable self-portrait Patrick White explains how on the very rare occasions when he re-reads a passage from one of his books, he recognises very little of the self he knows. This 'unknown' is the man interviewers and visiting students expect to find, but 'unable to produce him', he prefers to remain private, or as private as anyone who has been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature can ever be. In this book is the self Patrick White does recognise, the one he sees reflected in the glass.

The Living and the Dead

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

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

To hesitate on the edge of life or to plunge in and risk change -this is the dilemma explored in THE LIVING AND THE DEAD. Patrick White's second novel is set in thirties London and 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 and impulsively with left-wing politics and love affairs. Only the son, Elyot, remains an aloof and scholarly observer - until dramatic events shock him into sudden self-knowledge.

The Burnt Ones

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.

Patrick White's first collection of short stories confirms his strength as a creative artist.

Eleven stories to which Patrick White brings his immense understanding of the urges which lie just beneath the facade of ordinary human relationships, especially those between men and women. A girl beset by her mother's influence, who marries her father's friend. . . A young man strangely moved into marriage with a girl like the mother who never understood him. . . A pretty market researcher who learns the ultimate details of love with a difference. . . The collector of bird-calls who unwittingly records the call of a very human nature.

The Eye of the Storm

This mesmerizing, ambitious, lyrical masterpiece is perhaps Nobel Prize-winner Patrick White’s best novel.

Beautiful and heroic...Every passage merits attention and gives satisfaction

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

An antipodean King Lear writ gentle and tragicomic, almost Chekhovian . . . an intensely dramatic masterpiece.

NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE 
 
Elizabeth Hunter, an ex-socialite in her eighties, has a mystical experience during a summer storm in Sydney which transforms all her relationships: her existence becomes charged with a meaning which communicates itself to those around her. From this simple scenario Patrick White unfurls a monumental exploration of the tides of love and hate, comedy and tragedy, impotence and and longing that fester within family relationships.

The Twyborn Affair

[An] exploration of an extremely slippery characterological realm offers many substantial pleasures

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

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

Eddie Twyborn is bisexual and beautiful, the son of a Judge and a drunken mother. With his androgynous hero - Eudoxia/Eddie/Eadith Twyborn - and through his search for identity, for self-affirmation and love in its many forms, Patrick White takes us into the ambiguous landscapes, sexual, psychological and spiritual, of the human condition.

The Solid Mandala

This is the story of two people living one life. Arthur and Waldo Brown were born twins and destined never to to grow away from each other. They spent their childhood together. Their youth together. Middle-age together. Retirement together. They even shared the same girl. They shared everything - except their view of things. Waldo, with his intelligence, saw everything and understood little. Arthur was the fool who didn't bother to look. He understood.

The Tree of Man

An extraordinary story about a couple’s experience of moving into the remote Australian wilderness by Nobel Prize-winner Patrick White.

[This is] one of those magnificent novels given to us when a great writer is in perfect harmony with the mythic soul of humanity

He is, in the finest sense, a world novelist

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

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

A timeless work of art from which no essential element of life has been omitted

This novel describes almost the entire lifetimes of a husband and wife living simply on a farmstead in the Australian bush, in ceaselessly interesting, dramatic prose. You won&rsquo;t read anything else like it

Patrick White was born in England in 1912. His Australian parents took him home when he was six months old but educated him in England, at Cheltenham College and King's College, Cambridge. He settled in London, where his first novel, Happy Valley, was published to some acclaim in 1939. After serving in the RAF during the Second World War he returned to Australia with his partner, Manoly Lascaris. The novels, short stories and plays that followed The Tree of Man in 1956 made White a considerable figure in world literature. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1973. The Hanging Garden was begun and put aside in 1981 when White was lured away to write once again for the theatre. The unfinished novel was found among his papers after his death in September 1990 and published in 2012.

Stan Parker, with only a horse and a dog for company journeys to a remote patch of land he has inherited in the Australian hills. Once the land is cleared and a rudimentary house built, he brings his wife Amy to the wilderness. Together they face lives of joy and sorrow as they struggle against the environment.

The Aunt's Story

Patrick White was born in England in 1912. He was taken to Australia (where his father owned a sheep farm) when he was six months old, but educated in England, at Cheltenham College and King's College, Cambridge. He settled in London, where he wrote several unpublished novels, then served in the RAF during the war; he returned after the war to Australia. 
 
He became the most considerable figure in modern Australian literature, awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1973. The great poet of Australian landscape, he has turned its vast empty spaces into great mythic landscapes of the soul. His position as man of letters was controversial, provoked by his acerbic, unpredictable public statements and his belief that it is eccentric individuals who offer the only hope of salvation. Technically brilliant, he is one modern novelist to whom the oft-abused epithet 'visionary' can be safely be applied. He died in September 1990.

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

Duffield's rise from humble beginnings to grotesque monster is brilliantly told and captures the singlemindedness of many 20th-century greats

Hurtle Duffield is incapable of loving anything except what 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. It is only when Hurtle meets an egocentric adolescent whom he sees as his spiritual child does he experience a deeper, more treacherous emotion.

Patrick White

Praise for The Vivisector

One of the greatest magicians of fiction ... White's scope is vast and his invention endless

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

Australia's greatest novelist

One of the greatest magicians of fiction ... White's scope is vast and his invention endless

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

Australia's greatest novelist

One of the greatest magicians of fiction ... White's scope is vast and his invention endless

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

Australia's greatest novelist

Books by Patrick White

Articles featuring Patrick White

9 brilliant pieces of gender bending fiction

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