The Great World
  • Published: 5 February 1999
  • ISBN: 9780099273868
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 336
  • RRP: $24.99

The Great World

Formats & editions
EBook
31 Oct 2012
Paperback
5 Feb 1999
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Winner of the Commonwealth Prize, this astonishing novel invites us on a journey far across time - covering some seventy years - and space - ranging across Australia - and deep into the human heart.

Every city, town and village has its memorial to war. Nowhere are these more eloquent than in Australia, generations of whose young men have enlisted to fight other people's battles - from Gallipoli and the Somme to Malaya and Vietnam. In THE GREAT WORLD, his finest novel yet, David Malouf gives a voice to that experience. But THE GREAT WORLD is more than a novel of war. Ranging over seventy years of Australian life, from Sydney's teeming King's Cross to the tranquil backwaters of the Hawkesbury River, it is a remarkable novel of self-knowledge and lost innocence, of survival and witness.
  • Published: 5 February 1999
  • ISBN: 9780099273868
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 336
  • RRP: $24.99
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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.

portrait photo of David Malouf

Also by David Malouf

An Imaginary Life
Being There
A First Place
The Conversations At Curlew Creek
Every Move You Make
Dream Stuff
Johnno
See all

Praise for The Great World

It is this characteristic opposition which makes The Great World a truthful portrait of Australia. Sufferings and wrongs abound, but there is no dullness.

Independent

An example of how fiction may still be individual, honest and humanly truthful. Malouf's great talent is precisely for unmasking the epic or world-historical - for finding the human backing to history's all reflecting mirror

The Times

Lucid and accessible. His most ambitious book so far

Guardian

A truthful portait of Australia

Independent on Sunday

A book of great stature with moral force and moral truth

Times Literary Supplement
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