Patrick White

To hesitate on the edge of life or to plunge in and risk change -this is the dilemma explored in THE LIVING AND THE DEAD. Patrick White's second novel is set in thirties London and portrays the complex ebb and flow of relationships within the Standish family. Mrs Standish, ageing but still beautiful, is drawn into secret liaisons, while her daughter Eden experiments openly and impulsively with left-wing politics and love affairs. Only the son, Elyot, remains an aloof and scholarly observer - until dramatic events shock him into sudden self-knowledge.

The award-winning and bestselling biography of Australia's only Nobel Prize-winner for Literature. 'I think this book should be called The Monster of All Time. But I am a monster . . .' Patrick White Patrick White, winner of the Nobel Prize and author of more than a dozen novels and plays - including Voss, The Vivisector and The Twyborn Affair - lived an extraordinary life. David Marr's brilliant biography draws not only on a wide range of original research but also on the single most difficult and important source of all: the man himself. In the weeks before his death, White read the final manuscript, which for richness of detail, authority and balance is stunning.Throughout his exciting narrative, Marr explores the roots of White's writing and unearths the raw material of his remarkable art. He makes plain the central fact of White's life as an artist: the homosexuality that formed his view of himself as an outcast and stranger able to penetrate the hearts of both men and women. Gracefully written and exhaustively researched, Patrick White is a biography of classic excellence - sympathetic, objective, penetrating and as blunt, when necessary, as White himself.

This Patrick White masterpiece, now in a Vintage Classics edition Hurtle Duffield, a painter, is incapable of loving anything except what he paints. The men and women who court him during his long life are, above all, the victims of his art. He is the vivisector, dissecting their weaknesses with cruel precision: his sister's deformity, a grocer's moonlight indiscretion, and the passionate illusions of his mistress Hero Pavloussi. It is only when Hurtle meets an egocentric adolescent whom he sees as his spiritual child does he experience a deeper, more treacherous emotion in this tour de force of sexual and psychological menace that sheds brutally honest light on the creative experience.

An essential late novel from one of the foremost novelists of the twentieth century, now a part of the Text Classics series

Patrick White's novel that brought prominence to Australian literature. 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. 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. From the careful delineation of Victorian society to the sensitive rendering of hidden love to the stark narrative of adventure in the Australian desert, Patrick White's novel is a work of extraordinary power and virtuosity.

But readers of Mountie in Mukluks will soon realize they are in the presence of one of the most un-cop-like cops who ever built an igloo. And by the time they have finished they will never be able to think quite the same way about the fabled Redcoats, or life in the far north. During the 1930s, Bill White gave up trapping and joined the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, volunteering for arctic service. Arctic life was so dodgy in those days of the Mad Trapper and The Lost Patrol, the force couldn't send you there against your will, so volunteering was the only way to get there. Bill started out crewing on the historic RCMP patrol ship St. Roch under the command of the legendary Captain Henry Larsen, but hungered for greater adventure and requested a posting ashore upon reaching Cambridge Bay. Adventure he found: Mountie in Mukluks includes hair-raising accounts of a near-death experience under the ice on a frozen river; of a 1200-mile dog-sled chase after an arctic murderer; and of numerous fascinating encounters with shamans, telepathy and an Inuit way of life that has now vanished from the earth. White's absorbing oral accounts of life in the old north, molded into lively prose by Patrick White, place Mountie in Mukluks among classics of arctic literature like Kabloona by Gontran de Poncins and People of the Deer by Farley Mowat. Mountie in Mukluks is sure to cause a stir among enthusiasts of police and Arctic lore. As a cop who chose to adopt a Native lifestyle and was honoured with his own Inuit name, Bill White makes a devastating critique of the white settler way of life and its red-coated enforcers who disdained the traditions of the Inuit while simultaneously relying on them for survival.

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY DAVID MALOUF Through 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.