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  • Published: 1 April 2010
  • ISBN: 9781864711486
  • Imprint: Vintage Australia
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 416
  • RRP: $22.99

A Fringe Of Leaves




From the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature

From the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature

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 Australian Aboriginals, 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.

  • Published: 1 April 2010
  • ISBN: 9781864711486
  • Imprint: Vintage Australia
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 416
  • RRP: $22.99

About the author

Patrick White

Patrick White was born in England in 1912 and taken to Australia, where his father owned a sheep farm, when he was six months old. He was educated in England at Cheltenham college and King's College, Cambridge. He settled in London, where he wrote several unpublished novels, then served in the RAF during the war. He returned to Australia after the war.
He became the most considerable figure in modern Australian literature, awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1973. The great poet of Australian landscape, he turned its vast empty spaces into great mythic landscapes of the soul. His position as a man of letters was controversial, provoked by his acerbic, unpredictable public statements and his belief that it is eccentric individuals who offer the only hope of salvation. He died in September 1990.

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Praise for A Fringe Of Leaves

In his major post-war novels, the pain and earnestness of the individual's quest for 'meaning and design' can be felt more intensely than perhaps anywhere else in contemporary Western prose.

The Sunday Times

A complete success . . . this is one of his best novels.

Paul Theroux, The Times

To read Patrick White . . . is to touch a source of power, to move through areas made new and fresh, to see men and women with a sharpened gaze.

The Daily Telegraph