Patrick White - The Fringe of Leaves

‘It challenges comparison with some of the world’s most bizarre masterpieces’

Isobel Murray, Financial 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’

Daily Telegraph

‘The one novelist at present at work in the English language who is indisputably possessed of genius’

Sunday Telegraph

Patrick White THE VIVISECTOR

Hurtle Duffield is incapable of loving anything except when 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. Only the egocentric adolescent he sees as his spiritual child elicits from him a deeper, more treacherous emotion.

‘Probably his finest book … makes almost all other novels dealing with the life of an artist look trivial’

Sunday Times

‘Patrick White is, in the finest sense, a world novelist. His themes are catholic and complex and he pursues them with a single-minded energy and vision’

Robert Nye, Guardian

‘One of the great magicians of fiction … White’s scope is vast and his invention endless’

Angus Wilson, Observer

Patrick White VOSS

Set in nineteenth-century Australia, Voss is the story of the 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.

‘A work of genius … Voss has an epic quality, the ageless sense of power and pride of a man battling with his condition’

Observer

‘By far the most impressive novel I have read this year’

Walter Allen, New Statesman