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Grand Days
  • Published: 19 March 2018
  • ISBN: 9780143790907
  • Imprint: Penguin
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 736
  • RRP: $24.99

Grand Days

Formats & editions
Paperback
19 Mar 2018
EBook
26 Oct 2011
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Meet Edith Campbell Berry, the woman all Australian women would like to be.

'Any of Frank Moorhouse's books are rewarding and stimulating. But his trilogy following a young Australian diplomat at the founding of the League of Nations is a masterpiece. In Edith Campbell Berry, his heroine, he created one of the enduring characters in literature. The trilogy is Grand Days, Dark Palace and Cold Light. All are must reads.' - Michael Williams, Qantas magazine

On a train from Paris to Geneva, Edith Campbell Berry meets Major Ambrose Westwood in the dining car, makes his acquaintance over a lunch of six courses, and allows him to kiss her passionately.Their early intimacy binds them together once they reach Geneva and their posts at the newly created League of Nations. There, a heady idealism prevails over Edith and her young colleagues, and nothing seems beyond their grasp, certainly not world peace.

The exuberance of the times carries over into Geneva nights: Edith is drawn into a dark and glamorous underworld where, coaxed by Ambrose, she becomes more and more sexually adventurous. Reading Grand Days is a rare experience: it is vivid and wise, full of shocks of recognition and revelation. The final effect of the book is intoxicating and unplaceably original.
  • Published: 19 March 2018
  • ISBN: 9780143790907
  • Imprint: Penguin
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 736
  • RRP: $24.99
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About the author

Frank Moorhouse

Frank Moorhouse was born in the coastal town of Nowra, NSW. He worked as an editor of small-town newspapers and as an administrator and in 1970s became a full-time writer. He won national prizes for his fiction, non-fiction, and essays. He was best known for the highly acclaimed Edith trilogy, Grand Days, Dark Palace, and Cold Light, novels which follow the career of an Australian woman in the League of Nations in the 1920s and 1930s through to the International Atomic Energy Agency in the 1970s as she struggled to become a diplomat. His last book The Drover’s Wife – a reading adventure published in October 2017, brings together works inspired by Henry Lawson’s story and examines the attachment Australia has to the story and to Russell Drysdale’s painting of the same name. Frank was awarded a number of fellowships including writer in residence at King’s College Cambridge, a Fulbright Fellowship, and a fellowship at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington. His work has been translated into several languages. He was made a member of the Order of Australia for services to literature in 1985 and was made a Doctor of the University by Griffith University in 1997 and a Doctor of Letters (honoris causa) by the University of Sydney, 2015. Frank Moorhouse died, in Sydney, on 26 June 2022.

portrait photo of Frank Moorhouse

Also by Frank Moorhouse

The Drover's Wife
Australia Under Surveillance
The Commune Does Not Want You
The Story of the Knife
The Commune Does Not Want You (Storycuts)
The Story of the Knife (Storycuts)
Cold Light
See all

Praise for Grand Days

This is the first of Moorhouse's three rich and complex books about a young Australian woman who sets off for Geneva in the 1920s to begin a diplomatic career with the newly formed League of Nations. Edith Campbell Berry is my favourite fictional character ever: sophisticated but frequently gauche, intelligent but naive, this is her getting of personal and political wisdom.

Liz Byrski, The Sunday Age

I’d quite like to be Edith Campbell Berry from Frank Moorhouse’s Grand Days. She’s game for anything, living in the centre of the world, surrounded by passion and idealism and intrigue.

Emily Maguire, author

An irreducibly rich, sustained and complex work of the imagination.

The Independant

Moorhouse has for a long time been one of the most original and professional of Australian writers in the world of literature and English. Grand Days is the summit of this achievement.

Geoffrey Dutton, The Australian Book Review

Edith Campbell Berry is one of the most winning women in contemporary fiction . . . There is colour galore - a risque interlude in Paris, a Geneva riot, friendships made and broken, moments of real pathos and terror. The book would make an extraordinarily glamorous movie, and most actresses would brawl to play sexy, smart, plucky Edith.

Publisher's Weekly

Funny, scary and extremely sexy . . . Truly a grand book.

UK Vogue