Nine-year-old Clement Killeaton’s father makes a living placing bets on horse races for a professional gambler. His mother is a pious Catholic. His fellow students are cruel and aloof. But from these elements, all suffused with the mysterious but forbidden attractions of sex, Clement creates an imagined world of his own. Centred on fictional horses, the races they run, and their invented owners, jockeys, and fellow competitors, it is played out with Clement’s prized marble collection in the dusty backyard of his home, across the landscapes of the district, and over the continent of Australia.
An unsparing evocation of a bygone way of life, Tamarisk Row’s lyrical prose is charged with the yearning, boredom, fear, and fascinations of childhood.
“An enigmatic author, possibly the best you’ve never heard of . . . His work insists on the reality of the inner world—perhaps even its primacy.” —Melissa Harrison, Financial Times
“An authentically modernist novel . . . Its themes, as well as its technique, place him in the tradition of Katherine Mansfield and James Joyce.” —Jon Day, The Guardian
“Strange and wonderful and nearly impossible to describe.” —New York Times
“Tamarisk Row is a remarkably acute portrayal of what it is to be a bullied, confused boy, while Border Districts is dazzling for its austerity, its cruel purity. Their sentences ring in the ear, and the novels stay with you.” —The Spectator
“The chief pleasures here are his departures from convention, eccentricities of tone and diction, and flights of fancy, all trademarks of his later fiction. . . An essential entry in this exceptional writer’s corpus.” — Kirkus Reviews, starred review
About the Author
Gerald Murnane is the award-winning author of such acclaimed works of fiction as Border Districts, Inland, Barley Patch, and The Plains, as well as the memoir Something for the Pain. Murnane lives in the remote village of Goroke in the northwest of Victoria, near the border with South Australia.
