The last Patrick White novel published in his lifetime, Memoirs of Many in One presents the eccentric, often fantastical recollections of the ageing actor, Alex Xenophon Demirjian Gray. These are 'edited' by the writer Patrick White, her friend and executor, who is often the target of her scorn. Witty and affecting, Memoirs reveals another side of White's fiction even as it echoes many of the themes running through his work. 'A strong case could be made for White as the finest and most profound novelist anywhere in the world now working in English...Memoirs of Many in One will fascinate any reader.' Washington Post 'A last work in which everything that was serious in the early books suffered a final daring transformation to burlesque: not least of all the author, that impossible person Patrick White.' David Malouf

This is the story of two people living one life. Arthur and Waldo Brown were born twins and destined never to to grow away from each other. They spent their childhood together. Their youth together. Middle-age together. Retirement together. They even shared the same girl. They shared everything - except their view of things. Waldo, with his intelligence, saw everything and understood little. Arthur was the fool who didn't bother to look. He understood. As they compete with and care for each other through half a century, their lives are inextricably intertwined - the two sides of a man's nature forming a totality.

The wild and beautiful birds of the title are the cockatoos who - welcome trespassers in a surburban garden - transform the lives of those they condescend to visit. The Davorens, who for seven years have lived in total silence, are united suddenly in mutual worship of their exotic guests. Miss Le Cornu, the lonely spinster for whom Davoren's calls have become a needed ritual, regards the birds' descent on her chimney-pot as a privilege little short of divine grace. Savage but kind-eyed, tearing with fierce beak at his chosen victim, the cockatoo appears in many disguises in this masterly collection of short novels and stories. Essentially, the book's theme is intimacy, that close relationship in which possessive love can invade and cripple the spirit. In A Woman's Hand, and elderly man married to a proud, manipulative woman perceives in another man's magnificent isolation the stillness and contentment that he will never achieve. Allegedly raped by a...

The first novel by Australia's only Nobel Prize winner for literature, which has been out of print for more than 70 years. Originally published in 1939, Happy Valley is set in a small country town in the Snowy Mountains. Based on Patrick White’s own experiences in the early 1930s as a jackaroo at Bolaro, near Adaminaby in south-eastern New South Wales, Happy Valley paints a portrait of a community in a desolate landscape. It is a jagged and restless study of small-town and country life. White was twenty-seven when Happy Valley was published by George C. Harrop in London. This mesmerising first novel gives us a prolonged glimpse of literary genius in the making. It won the Australian Literature Society Gold Medal in 1941, but White did not allow the novel to be republished in English in his lifetime. Its appearance now in the Text Classics series, with an introduction by Peter Craven, is a major literary...

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY DAVID MALOUFThrough the crumbling ruins of the once splendid Xanadu, Miss Hare wanders, half-mad. In the wilderness she stumbles upon an Aborigine artist and a Jewish refugee. They place themselves in the care of a local washerwoman. In a world of pervasive evil, all four have been independently damaged and discarded. Now in one shared vision they find themselves bound together, understanding the possibility of redemption.

Eddie Twyborn is bisexual and beautiful, the son of a Judge and a drunken mother. With this androgynous hero - Eudoxia/Eddie/Eadith Twyborn - and through his search for identity, for self-affirmation and love in its many forms, Patrick White takes us on a journey into the ambiguous landscapes, sexual, psychological and spiritual, of the human condition.

Set in Australia in the 1840s, A FRINGE OF LEAVES combines dramatic action with a finely distilled moral vision. Returning home to England from Van Diemen's land, the Bristol Maid is shipwrecked on the Queensland coast and Mrs Roxburgh is taken prisoner by a tribe of aborigines, along with the rest of the passengers and crew. In the course of her escape, she is torn by conflicting loyalties - to her dead husband, to her rescuer, to her own and to her adoptive class.

Elizabeth Hunter, an ex-socialite in her eighties, has a mystical experience during a summer storm in Sydney which transforms all her relationships: her existence becomes charged with a meaning which communicates itself to those around her. From this simple scenario Patrick White unfurls a monumental exploration of the tides of love and hate, comedy and tragedy, impotence and and longing that fester within family relationships. In the Sydney suburb of Centennial Park, three nurses, a housekeeper and a solicitor attend to Elizabeth as her son and daughter convene at her deathbed. But, in death as in life, Elizabeth remains a destructive force on those who surround her. THE EYE OF THE STORM is a savage exploration of family relationships - and the sharp undercurrents of love and hate, comedy and tragedy, which define them.

Set in nineteenth-century Australia, Voss is the story of the secret passion between an explorer and a naïve young woman. Although they have met only a few times, Voss and Laura are joined by overwhelming, obsessive feelings for each other. Voss sets out to cross the continent, and as hardships, mutiny and betrayal whittle away his power to endure and to lead, his attachment to Laura gradually increases. Laura, waiting in Sydney, moves through the months of separation as if they were a dream and Voss the only reality.

Stan Parker, with only a horse and a dog for company journeys to a remote patch of land he has inherited in the Australian hills. Once the land is cleared and a rudimentary house built, he brings his wife Amy to the wilderness. Together they face lives of joy and sorrow as they struggle against the environment.