A masterwork from Australia's greatest cult literary figure, published for the first time as the author originally intended.
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 is a revelatory portrait of the artist as a young man.
About the Author
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 eleven other works of fiction, including The Plains, A Million Windows and, most recently, Border Districts [shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award]. In 1999 Murnane won the Patrick White Award and in 2009 he won the Melbourne Prize for Literature. He lives in western Victoria.
"Murnane’s protagonist is absolutely unforgettable, and the author himself, whose name has been appearing on Nobel Prize–contender lists recently, only adds to his exceptional body of work with this wonderful novel.”―Publishers Weekly [starred]
"The most accessible book by this extraordinary author."―Booklist
‘“A bizarre masterpiece that can feel less like something you’ve read than something you’ve dreamed.”―Ben Lerner, New Yorker
“Strange and wonderful.”―New York Times on The Plains
”Murnane, a genius, is a worthy heir to Beckett.”―Teju Cole on The Plains
“Murnane touches on foibles and philosophy, plays with the makings of a fable or allegory, and all the while toys with tone, moving easily from earnest to deadpan to lightly ironic…Provocative, delightful, diverting.”―Kirkus (starred) on The Plains
"Murnane, in his unfailingly serious way, is very funny ... we read and think about him ruminating on his reading and thinking about reading and thinking until the book rather gloriously threatens to swallow itself whole."―Harper's Magazine on Border Districts
"Devotees of Murnane (The Plains), the exacting Australian writer of crafty, austere fictions, will find familiar themes in this prismatic work: the fascination with color, the grassy landscapes, and the obsessive compiling of a mind’s 'image-history.’"―Publishers Weekly on Stream System
"An old man ruminates on landscapes and houses, authors and religion, colored glass and memory in this drifting quasi-fiction. The unnamed narrator, age 72, has recently moved from a city to live alone in a 'quiet township' near an unspecified border in an unnamed country. In the opening pages, he recalls his school days and the religious brothers who taught him."―Kirkus [starred] on Stream System
"One of Australia’s most important writers."―Publishers Weekly [starred] on Stream System
“An exploration of the mind and of literary creation, it is a book of intricate construction and vast intellectual scope.”―New York Times on A Million Windows
“An extraordinary and consistently compelling read from beginning to end.”―Midwest Book Review on A Million Windows
“Murnane is a master of breathing life into fiction, and his compilation of ideas on the subject holds immense value because those ideas are often so idiosyncratic and contrarian.”―Publishers Weekly on A Million Windows
“Compels the reader to question the relationship between fiction and reality, the visible and invisible world”―World Literature Today on A Million Windows
“[Murnane's] emotional conviction . . . is so intense, the somber lyricism so moving, the intelligence behind the chiseled sentences so undeniable, that we suspend all disbelief.”―J.M. Coetzee, The New York Review of Books on A Million Windows
