Synopses & Reviews
Inland is a compact story—or group of stories, each nested within another—nonetheless opening onto a seemingly endless fractal geography, where the interior of Australia, the Midwestern prairie, and the Hungarian Alföld merge, imitate, and enfold one another in the mind of a man sitting alone in a room full of books. Perhaps the greatest novel by Gerald Murnane, Australia’s reply to Proust and Calvino, and a Nobel favorite for several years running, Inland shows that one can as easily be an exile in one’s own interior as out in the wide world, and as easily feel the loss of people one has only imagined as those who have shared our lives in the flesh.
Synopsis
Is it possible to fall in love with a correspondent based entirely on a fascination with his or her handwriting, with a map of the country they live in, with the syllables of their name? What about, then, a fictional character, in a book about a country one has never, and will never, visit?
About the Author
Gerald Murnane was born in Melbourne, Australia in 1939. He is the author of eight works of fiction, including Barley Patch, Inland, The Plains, and Tamarisk Row, as well as a collection of essays, Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs. Murnane has been a recipient of the Patrick White Award and the Melbourne Prize. Barley Patch won the 2010 Adelaide Festival Award for Innovation.