Season on Earth A

Product Description

Lost to the world for more than four decades, A Season on Earth is the essential link between two acknowledged masterpieces by Gerald Murnane- the lyrical account of boyhood in his debut novel, Tamarisk Row, and the revolutionary prose of The Plains.A Season on Earth is Murnane?s second novel as it was intended to be, bringing together all of its four sections-the first two of which were published as A Lifetime on Clouds in 1976 and the last two of which have never been in print.A hilarious tale of a lustful teenager in 1950s Melbourne, A Lifetime on Clouds has been considered an outlier in Murnane?s fiction. That is because, as Murnane writes in his foreword, it is 'only half a book and Adrian Sherd only half a character?.Here, at last, is sixteen-year-old Adrian?s journey in full, from fantasies about orgies with American film stars and idealised visions of suburban marital bliss to his struggles as a Catholic novice, and finally a burgeoning sense of the boundless imaginative possibilities to be found in literature and landscapes.Adrian Sherd is one of the great comic creations in Australian writing, and A Season on Earth a revelatory portrait of the artist as a young man.Lost to the world for more than four decades, A Season on Earth is the essential link between two acknowledged masterpieces by Gerald Murnane- the lyrical account of boyhood in his debut novel, Tamarisk Row, and the revolutionary prose of The Plains.A Season on Earth is Murnane?s second novel as it was intended to be, bringing together all of its four sections-the first two of which were published as A Lifetime on Clouds in 1976 and the last two of which have never been in print.A hilarious tale of a lustful teenager in 1950s Melbourne, A Lifetime on Clouds has been considered an outlier in Murnane?s fiction. That is because, as Murnane writes in his foreword, it is 'only half a book and Adrian Sherd only half a character?.Here, at last, is sixteen-year-old Adrian?s journey in full, from fantasies about orgies with American film stars and idealised visions of suburban marital bliss to his struggles as a Catholic novice, and finally a burgeoning sense of the boundless imaginative possibilities to be found in literature and landscapes.Adrian Sherd is one of the great comic creations in Australian writing, and A Season on Earth a revelatory portrait of the artist as a young man.
Gerald Murnane was born in Melbourne in 1939. He has been a primary teacher, an editor and a university lecturer. His debut novel, Tamarisk Row (1974), was followed by ten other works of fiction, including The Plains and most recently Border Districts. In 1999 Murnane won the Patrick White Award and in 2009 he won the Melbourne Prize for Literature. He lives in western Victoria.