Tamarisk Row - by Gerald Murnane (Paperback)

About the Book

An unsparing evocation of a Catholic childhood in a Victorian country town in the late 1940s. Clement Killeaton transforms his father's obsession with gambling, his mother's piety, the cruelty of his fellow pupils and the mysterious but forbidden attractions of sex, into an imagined world.

Book Synopsis

Clement Killeaton transforms his father's gambling, his mother's piety, his fellow pupils' cruelty and the mysterious but forbidden attractions of sex into an imagined world centred on horse-racing and played out in the dusty backyard of his home, across the landscapes of the district, and the continent of Australia. An unsparing evocation of a Catholic childhood in a country town in the late 1940s, Tamarisk Row's lyrical prose is charged with the yearning, boredom, fear and fascination of boyhood.

First published in Australia in 1974, and previously unpublished in the UK, Tamarisk Row is Gerald Murnane's debut novel, and in many respects his masterpiece.

Review Quotes

"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.