> Skip to content
  • Published: 1 July 2012
  • ISBN: 9781742759012
  • Imprint: Vintage Australia
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 320
  • RRP: $22.99

The Solid Mandala




Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature

Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature.

In The Solid Mandala Patrick White draws a telling and touching portrait of twin brothers. Waldo is the competent man of reason, he sees himself as the superior intellect. Arthur, accepted as a half-wit is the innocent, God's fool, loving and outgoing in a blundering way. 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.

  • Published: 1 July 2012
  • ISBN: 9781742759012
  • Imprint: Vintage Australia
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 320
  • 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 He settled in London, where he wrote several unpublished novels, then served in the RAF during the war.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.

Also by Patrick White

See all

Praise for The Solid Mandala

A tragi-comedy, suffused with an almost Shakespearian humanity.

New York Review of Books

He is more like Dostoevsky than Thomas Mann: his novels are maelstroms of the soul whose power resides in the nightmare detail which assails their protagonists. They testify to the beauty and contortion of the spirit as few others this century have done.

Sunday Telegraph

His most finished and powerful work.

Sunday Times

Wonderfully fresh and human ... full of exhilarating energy and wit.

Saturday Review