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  • Published: 5 July 1994
  • ISBN: 9780099302421
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 192
  • RRP: $19.99

Remembering Babylon

winner of the Commonwealth Writers Prize and Dublin Literary Award




A young boy caught in the conflict between early British settlers and native Aborigines witnesses the barbaric tensions that bedeviled the birth of a nation in this profound and mythical novel.

A searing and magnificent picture of Australia at the moment of its foundation, with early settlers staking out their small patch of land and terrified by the harsh and alien continent. Focussing on the hostility between the early British inhabitants and the native Aborigines. Remembering Bablyon tells the tragic and compelling story of a boy who finds himself caught between the two worlds. Shot through with humour, and written with the poetic intensity that characterised Malouf's An Imaginary Life, this is a novel of epic scope yet it is simple, compassionate and universal: a classic.

  • Published: 5 July 1994
  • ISBN: 9780099302421
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 192
  • RRP: $19.99

About the author

David Malouf

David Malouf is the internationally acclaimed author of novels including Ransom, The Great World (winner of the Commonwealth Writers’ prize and the Prix Femina Etranger), Remembering Babylon (winner of the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award), An Imaginary Life, Conversations at Curlow Creek, Dream Stuff, Every Move You Make and his autobiographical classic 12 Edmondstone Street. His Collected Stories won the 2008 Australia-Asia Literary Award. His most recent books are A First Place and The Writing Life. He was born in 1934 and was brought up in Brisbane.

Also by David Malouf

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Praise for Remembering Babylon

The novel is beautifully written. Malouf's Queensland shimmers.

Susan Geason, The Sun Herald (Sydney, Austrailia)

Remembering Babylon is another rare chance to read a work by one of the few contemporary novelists who examines our constantly battered humanity and again and again brings out its lingering beauty

Terry Goldie, The Globe and Mail (Canada)

Malouf dares a style in which a metaphor clinches a whole personality, while the common act of looking at the light and plants of Australia produces plainly spiritual transformations.

Francis Spufford, The Guardian (London)

A dazzling novel...The story has moments of such high intensity that they remain scorched in memory. As the story moves forward to its conclusion, we go unwillingly with it, not wanting this book, with the wisdom it contains, to stop speaking to us.

The Toronto Star

There are passages of aching beauty in Remembering Babylon, and passages of shocking degradation. Mr. Malouf has written a wonderfully wise and moving novel, a novel that turns the history and mythic past of Australia into a dazzling fable of human hope and imperfection

New York Times