A New York Times Notable Book of the Year.From the moment The Drover's Wife and Other Stories first appeared, it was clear that Murray Bail had extended the possibilities of short fiction. In these deft, angular and entertaining stories, he creates strange and fascinating worlds.A man named Huebler decides to photograph everyone alive. A suburban father perches in his son's tree-house to spy on his friends. A dentist recognises his estranged wife in a famous painting.This enlarged and revised edition contains such classic stories as 'The Drover's Wife', 'Ore' and 'A, B, C, D, E...' It also presents a number of new stories including the astonishing 'The Seduction of My Sister', which tells an increasingly bizarre story of sibling rivalry and affection.'No fiction produced in this country shows a greater power of design ... An art as signatured and original as that of any poet or painter.' Australian Book Review

Holden's Performance is the sprawling tale of Holden Shadbolt, a guileless and matter-of-fact man, who passes through the Australian landscape, seeing the world around him flickering by in black and white. He develops a reputation for silence and reliability, and for an amazing photographic memory, making him useful to men of power and women who appear to need protection. His life compels him from the straight tramlines of Adelaide to the irregularities of Sydney, and on to Canberra, where streets form ever-decreasing circles.Holden Shadbolt is surrounded by flamboyant characters: Frank McBee, ebullient ex-corporal, scrap dealer and tycoon; Vern Hartnett, earnest proof-reader and provider of a factual diet; the comely usherette next door, teacher of the facts of life; and finally Colonel Light, who beckons Holden to join his team of bodyguards to prime ministers.'Superbly written; extraordinarily wide-ranging and inventive.' Times on Sunday

Winner of the Miles Franklin Literary Award and the Commonwealth Writers' Prize, Eucalyptus is Murray Bail's best and most moving novel.On a country property a man named Holland lives with his daughter Ellen. Over the years, as she grows into a beautiful young woman, he plants hundreds of different gum trees on his land. When Ellen is nineteen her father announces his decision: she will marry the man who can name all his species of eucalypt, down to the last tree. Suitors emerge from all corners, including the formidable, straight-backed Mr Cave, world expert on the varieties of eucalypt. And then, walking among her father's trees, Ellen chances on a strange young man who in the days that follow tells her dozens of stories set in cities, deserts, faraway countries...Eucalyptus is both a modern fairy tale and an unpredictable love story played out against the searing light and broken shadows of country Australia.'You will never forget what is at the heart...

One of Australia's most respected and admired writers, Murray Bail's wry humour and haunting power are fully realised in these compelling stories.In the brilliant title story 'Camouflage' Eric Banerjee, an unassuming Adelaide piano tuner is sent north to contribute to Australia's war effort in 1942. His experiences unexpectedly become some of the happiest of his life.Accompanying it is one of Bail's masterly pieces of short fiction, 'The Seduction of My Sister', a weird and compelling account of sibling rivalry and love.Murray Bail's short stories have been published widely both in Australia and the UK and have also appeared in the New Yorker magazine. His much-loved novel Eucalyptus, was the winner of the Commonwealth Writers Prize and The Miles Franklin Award.'Both these stories are remarkable, in utterly different ways: they exhibit the restraint and license of a true literary master.' Peter Craven, Australian Book Review

Homesickness, Murray Bail's brilliant first novel, won the 1980 National Book Council Award and the Age Book of the Year Award.Thirteen men and women, married and single, happy and sad, visit various countries and museums, hotels and shops. They are like tourists anywhere, except that wherever they go-Africa, England, South America, New York or Russia-they find nothing is as it seems. Challenged by unexpected propositions, differences and subtleties of life and history, Bail's tourists are in turn repelled, attracted, altered.'Bail is one of the very few highly accomplished stylists among contemporary writers.' Sydney Morning Herald

The Pages was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin, the Victorian Premier's and the Prime Minister's Literary Awards in 2009.On a family sheep station in western New South Wales, a brother and sister work the property while their reclusive brother, Wesley Antill, spends years toiling away in one of the sheds, writing his philosophy.Now he has died. Erica, a philosopher, is sent from Sydney to appraise his life's work. Accompanying her is Sophie, who needs distracting from a string of failed relationships. Her field is psychoanalysis. The pages Wesley wrote lie untouched in the shed, just as he left them. What will they reveal? Was he a genius? How will the visit change the lives of Erica and Sophie?The Pages is a beguiling meditation on friendship and love, on men and women, on landscape and the difficulties of thought itself, by one of Australia's greatest novelists.'One of the finest and most sensitively conceived meditations on the condition of being...

The Voyage is a masterly novel by a great writer at the peak of his powers.Frank Delage, piano manufacturer from Sydney, travels to Vienna, a city immersed in music, to present the Delage concert grand. He hopes to impress with its technical precision, its improvement on the old pianos of Europe.How could he not know his piano is all wrong for Vienna? Perhaps he should have tried Berlin.But a chance meeting with Amalia von Schalla brings new possibilities for Delage - connections, her daughter Elisabeth, and an avant garde composer. Now travelling home, on a container ship, with Elisabeth, the real story is about to begin.Murray Bail was born in Adelaide in 1941. He has won numerous awards, including the Commonwealth Writers Prize and the Miles Franklin Literary Award for Eucalyptus. His most recent novel, The Pages, was published in 2008 to great acclaim.'There's a lightness to Bail's writing - a gentle stealth in its revelations - that slowly but surely brings the reader alive...One of Australia's most original and imaginative writers.' Canberra Times'The Voyage is oblique, idiosyncratic and original. To read it is to breathe the rarefied air of an artistic consciousness, nostalgic for literary modernism. Bail deploys the structural integrity of the journey, such as the single day in Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway and James Joyce's Ulysses, to allow the disordered encroachment of the past on the present, and to permit a slippery, subjective treatment of time. This is a novel that demands your full attention, discoursing in an unbuttoned, Joycean fashion, approaching a sort of textual jouissance.' Weekend Australian'[The Voyage] is a lustrous piece of fiction, consistently surprising and illuminating, full of mirrors and illusions, but with the abiding face of real feeling and deep truth. We won't see a finer piece of fiction in the longest while.' Age'A fine achievement.' Australian Book Review'Here sits yet another elegant and most engaging piece of work from the ordered imagination of Murray Bail...a graceful and unfenced read.' Courier Mail/Daily Telegraph'Murray Bail's masterful novel is essentially a piece of music; and like all good music, although we know the plot from the start, it never fails to surprise us...Brilliant.' West Australian'This is an astonishing, defiant little book. Though concise in scale, it is vastly thought-provoking...If ever a novel could be said to exceed the sum of its many sensations, this masterful concoction engages, excites and perturbs with singular virtuosity.' Irish Times'A new novel release from Murray Bail is always worthy of rejoice. Few writers anywhere in the world can match the esteemed Australian for stylistic daring.' Irish Examiner'[an] astonishingly brilliant, defiant and utterly singular novel of intelligence, narrative shifts and frustrated desire, which makes more than a few nods to Voltaire’s Candide.' Eileen Battersby's book of the year, Irish Times