Inland

Gerald Murnane is the award-winning author of acclaimed works of fiction as Border Districts, The Plains and Inland, and equally acclaimed non-fiction such as Last Letter to a Reader and the essay collection Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs. Murnane lives in Goroke, a remote village in western Victoria, Australia.

‘The most ambitious, sustained, and powerful piece of writing Murnane has to date brought off. The underlying narrative is of the twelve-year-old boy and the girl from Bendigo Street, their friendship and their parting, and of the man’s later attempts, Orpheus-like, to summon her back, or if not her, then her shade, from the realm of the dead and the forgotten. Woven into this narrative are a number of motifs whose common element is resurrection: the violated serf girl who returns as an angel of defiance; the lovers in Wuthering Heights united beyond the grave; the great recuperative vision experienced by Marcel in Time Regained; and verses from the Gospel of Matthew that foretell the second coming of Christ.’ JM Coetzee, New York Review of Books