The Conversations At Curlew Creek

New novel by the author of Remembering Babylon, shortlisted for the 1993 Booker Prize and the Irish Times Fiction Prize.

David Malouf is internationally recognised as one of Australia's finest writers. His novels include Johnno, An Imaginary Life, Harland's Half Acre, and The Great World, which won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize and the Prix Femina Etranger in 1991. Remembering Babylon, his most recent novel, was shortlisted for the 1993 Booker Prize and won the inaugural IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. He has also written five collections of poetry - his Selected Poems: 1959-1989 is published by Chatto - and three opera libretti, of which the latest, Baa Baa Black Sheep, is published by Chatto. He lives in Sydney.

The year is 1827, and in a remote hut on the high plains of New South Wales, two strangers spend the night in talk. One, Carney, an illiterate Irishman, ex-convict and bushranger, is to be hanged at dawn. The other, Adair, also Irish, is the police officer who has been sent to supervise the hanging. As the night wears on, the two discover unexpected connections between their lives, and learn new truths. Outside the hut, Adair's troopers sit uneasily, reflecting on their own pasts and futures, waiting for the morning to come. With ironic humour and in prose of starkly evocative power, the novel moves between Australia and Ireland to explore questions of nature and justice, reason and un-reason, the workings of fate, and the small measure of freedom a man may claim in the face of death. A new novel by Malouf is a major event; The Conversations At Curlow Creek will confirm him as one of the greatest novelists of our time.

Jane Eyre

David Malouf is internationally recognized as one of Australia's finest contemporary writers. His novels include Remembering Babylon, shortlisted for the 1993 Booker Prize and winner of the first IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, and The Great World, winner of both the Commonwealth Writer's Prize and the Prix Fémina Etranger in 1991. He has also published collections of poetry and a volume of autobiography. He lives in Sydney.

Perfectly preserving the tone and mood of the novel whilst condensing it into two acts, David Malouf, with the gift for language already evident from his novels and poetry, presents afresh the timeless story of Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, one of the most enduring literary classics of all time. The love between Jane and Mr Rochester, and the mystery of the woman behind the locked door, are here set to music in the opera composed by Michael Berkeley.

Ransom

A brilliant Homeric fable in miniature for our times - a lyrical and surprising reworking of the story of the Trojan war by an acclaimed international writer.

A marvel - beautifully written, surprisingly moving... rather brilliant

A wonderful retelling of the encounter between Achilles and the Trojan King Priam in prose that's so good you want to eat it

A rich, moving and sometimes disturbing novel

David Malouf writes with the voice of a poet; his graceful fiction deals in truth and is always beautiful... This is a book that will engage and inspire... In writing this novel Malouf is honouring a great work and also making his own

In bringing something radically new, yet sensitively overlaid, to an already powerful epic, Malouf proves that an "untold tale" can be every bit as rewarding as its ancient original

David Malouf has written a rich, moving and sometimes disturbing novel, one to read, as it demands, in a sitting and then to return to and read slowly. It is a worthy tribute to Homer and to the enduring fascination with the Iliad and Odyssey exert on our imagination

This is a great story...Malouf's beautiful language puts fresh flesh on to these ancient characters

Few writers possess the natural lyric grace of Malouf

Malouf's poetic yet muscular prose is wonderful

A marvel- beautifully written, surprisingly moving, quietly rather brilliant

While Malouf's chief interest is in the human impulses that lie behind the epic deeds, he remains faithful to the beliefs and values of the ancient world

A dignified performance ... in writing this novel Malouf is honouring a great work and also making a great work of his own  ... his graceful fiction deals in truth and is always beautiful

Beautifully written and very moving, Ransom is a reimagining that respects Homer's original while expanding expertly on its themes.

Malouf captures the moving humanity of Priam's grief

Lyrical reworking of the final scenes of The Iliad

This superb novel goes by in a heartbeat, so smooth and engrossing is David Malouf's prose...It is a touching tale, full of pain, but rendered beautifully by Malouf's humanity

An audacious reworking of Homer's Iliad.

David Malouf...has given Homer's epic fresh life in this haunting mood piece...a graceful, eloquent text dominated by rage and sorrow

This novel explores the timeless motifs of epic, in miniature

You know it ends in death, and so do Malouf's haunted protagonists, but this telling, at once unfussy and wonderfully poetic, breathes warm life into a great epic

Breathtaking skill...an extraordinary emotional charge.

A finely honed, writerly and wise revisiting of one of the most famous episodes in The Iliad, when Priam the King of Troy goes to bring home the body of his dead son Hector. No-one in prose has managed to better Malouf's imaginative recreation of the Homeric world.

a potent new yarn... Beautifully written in simple language freighted with meaning, Ransom explores a king's impulse to act as a mourning father.

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 and his autobiographical classic 12 Edmondstone Street. His Collected Stories won the 2008 Australia-Asia Literary Award, and his story collections are Dream Stuff and Every Move You Make where met with critical acclaim. In 2008 Malouf was the Scottish Arts' Council Muriel Spark International Fellow. Born in 1934 in Brisbane, he now lives in Sydney.

In this exquisite gem of a novel, David Malouf shines new light on Homer's Iliad, adding twists and reflections, as well as flashes of earthy humour, to surprise and enchant. Lyrical, immediate and heartbreaking, Malouf's fable engraves the epic themes of the Trojan war onto a perfect miniature - themes of war and heroics, hubris and humanity, chance and fate, the bonds between soldiers, fathers and sons, all brilliantly recast for our times.

Every Move You Make

A brilliant collection by a great international writer - Malouf's range is dazzling and his canvas is the vast Australian continent, with unsettling glimpses of a world beyond.

Rare and luminous talent...an outstanding collection

Contemporary Australia lives and breathes, shudders, groans and even scratches without a trace of inhibition throughout these seven vivid narratives from one of the finest of contemporary writers

Graceful and unsettling... Malouf's prose is invariably elegant

A master of the incisive, seamless, turns-on-a-sixpence short story...this collection is a jewel

Tender and luminous tales...It is his rich landscapes for which Malouf is most often praised and this collection contains some of the most evocative descriptions of the Australian continent

Contemplative, ethereal, sharply perceptive, this collection is a fascinating exploration of the inner worlds that separate and connect us all

Malouf, always so precise in his characterisation, so poetic in his evocations of nature and so haunting in his insight into loneliness and frustrated love, is a writer to treasure

At times unsettling in the intensity of their vision, Malouf's stories provide a deeply intelligent meditation on the unknowability of the self

Colours and landscapes are evoked in language that, at once lush and direct, is in itself a pleasure and a reminder that Malouf is also a poet of considerable talent

His writing here has a fine descriptive delicacy and sensory exactness that act as guarantees of the stories' truth and the authenticity of the experiences they embody

Malouf deals with both the vast and the seemingly unimportant... He does it with biting wit, elegance and a rare, uncluttered honesty

Poignant and wonderful story...concentrates, without effort, all Malouf's themes...it needs to be read

A young man going off to war tries to make sense of his place in the world he is leaving; a composer's life plays itself out as a complex domestic cantata; an accident on a hunting trip speaks volumes, which its inarticulate victim never could; and a down-to-earth woman stubbornly tries to keep her feet on the ground at Ayers Rock. 
 
Malouf's men and women are together but curiously alone, looking for something they seem to have missed, or missed out on, in life. Powerfully rooted in the heat and the dust of the vast Australian continent, this is a heartbreakingly beautiful and richly satisfying collection by a master storyteller, one of the great writers of our time.

Dream Stuff

'In this outstanding collection of stories, David Malouf is at his best... Beautiful writing' Observer

Remarkable for its range and unsettling dynamism…in their subtlety, power and poetic finesse they are as good as any being written

A highly accomplished collection, and one that resonates in the mind long after the book is finished

A remarkable achievement… These stories are pearls

An excellent collection by any standard…a heart-warming book

Confirm[s] Malouf's stature as a writer of the very first order

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, His most recent, Ransom, published in 2010, and his autobiographical classic 12 Edmondstone Street. His Collected Stories won the 2008 Australia-Asia Literary Award, and his recent story collections are Dream Stuff ('These stories are pearls' Spectator) and Every Move You Make ('Rare and luminous talent' Guardian). In 2008 Malouf was the Scottish Arts' Council Muriel Spark International Fellow. Born in 1934 in Brisbane, where he was brought up, he lives in Sydney.

From the image of a small boy entranced by his mother's GI Escort, yet still hoping for the return of a father 'missing in action', to the portrait of an adult writer trying to piece together a defining image of his late father, these outstanding stories conjure up with sharp intensity the memories and events that make a man. 
 
These powerfully vivid stories range over more than a century of Australian life, from green tropical lushness to 'blacksoil country', from scrub and outback to city streets - evoking dark shadows beneath a bright sun, and lives shaped by the ghosts of history and the rhythms of unruly nature.

12 Edmondstone Street

Malouf invites us on an intimate, beautifully described journey into his own past, beginning in his childhood home.

Malouf's perceptions are deep and his use of language quite wonderful

David Malouf is an internationally acclaimed author. His books include the novels The Great World (winner of the Commonwealth Writers' prize and the Prix Femina Étranger), Remembering Babylon (shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and winner of the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award), An Imaginary Life, Conversations at Curlow Creek, and his latest, Ransom (winner of the Criticos Prize), the short story collections Dream Stuff ('These stories are pearls' Spectator), and Every Move You Make ('Rare and luminous talent' Guardian), and his autobiographical classic 12 Edmondstone Street. His Collected Stories won the 2008 Australia-Asia Literary Award. In 2008 Malouf was the Scottish Arts' Council Muriel Spark International Fellow. Born in 1934 in Brisbane, he now lives in Sydney.

Each house, like each place, has its own topography, its own lore. A complex history comes down to us, through household jokes and anecdotes, odd family habits, and irrational superstitions, that forever shapes what we see and the way in which we see it. 
 
Beginning with his childhood home, David Malouf moves on to show other landmarks in his life, and the way places and things create our private worlds. Written with humour and uncompromising intelligence, 12 Edmondstone Street is an unforgettable portrait of one man's life.

David Malouf

Malouf dares a style in which a metaphor clinches a whole personality, while the common act of looking at the light and plants of Australia produces plainly spiritual transformations.

Remembering Babylon is another rare chance to read a work by one of the few contemporary novelists who examines our constantly battered humanity and again and again brings out its lingering beauty

There are passages of aching beauty in Remembering Babylon, and passages of shocking degradation. Mr. Malouf has written a wonderfully wise and moving novel, a novel that turns the history and mythic past of Australia into a dazzling fable of human hope and imperfection

A dazzling novel...The story has moments of such high intensity that they remain scorched in memory. As the story moves forward to its conclusion, we go unwillingly with it, not wanting this book, with the wisdom it contains, to stop speaking to us.

The novel is beautifully written. Malouf's Queensland shimmers.

A searing and magnificent picture of Australia at the moment of its foundation, with early settlers staking out their small patch of land and terrified by the harsh and alien continent. Focussing on the hostility between the early British inhabitants and the native Aborigines, Remembering Bablyon tells the tragic and compelling story of a boy who finds himself caught between the two worlds. Shot through with humour, and poetic intensity, Malouf's epic novel of epic scope is simple, compassionate and universal.

David Malouf

Praise for Remembering Babylon

Malouf dares a style in which a metaphor clinches a whole personality, while the common act of looking at the light and plants of Australia produces plainly spiritual transformations.

Remembering Babylon is another rare chance to read a work by one of the few contemporary novelists who examines our constantly battered humanity and again and again brings out its lingering beauty

There are passages of aching beauty in Remembering Babylon, and passages of shocking degradation. Mr. Malouf has written a wonderfully wise and moving novel, a novel that turns the history and mythic past of ...

Malouf dares a style in which a metaphor clinches a whole personality, while the common act of looking at the light and plants of Australia produces plainly spiritual transformations.

Remembering Babylon is another rare chance to read a work by one of the few contemporary novelists who examines our constantly battered humanity and again and again brings out its lingering beauty

There are passages of aching beauty in Remembering Babylon, and passages of shocking degradation. Mr. Malouf has written a wonderfully wise and moving novel, a novel that turns the history and mythic past of ...

Malouf dares a style in which a metaphor clinches a whole personality, while the common act of looking at the light and plants of Australia produces plainly spiritual transformations.

Remembering Babylon is another rare chance to read a work by one of the few contemporary novelists who examines our constantly battered humanity and again and again brings out its lingering beauty

There are passages of aching beauty in Remembering Babylon, and passages of shocking degradation. Mr. Malouf has written a wonderfully wise and moving novel, a novel that turns the history and mythic past of ...

Books by David Malouf

Follow penguin

Follow ladybird

Follow puffin

Sign up to the Penguin newsletter