Camouflage And Other Stories

Murray Bail was born in Adelaide in 1941. Homesickness, his first novel, won the National Book Award for Australian Literature and the Melbourne Age Book of the Year Award. Holden's Performance, first published in 1988, won the Vance Palmer Prize for Fiction. Eucalyptus was the winner of the Commonwealth Writers Prize and the Miles Franklin Literary Award. Murray Bail's non-fiction includes an acclaimed monograph on the work of the painter Ian Fairweather and Longhand, A Writer's Notebook.

Superb and surprising new fiction is found in this major new collection from the Australian master. 
 
A man named Huebler decides to photograph everyone alive. A suburban father perches in his son's tree house to spy on his friends. A dentist recognises his estranged wife in a famous painting. 'The Seduction of My Sister' tells of the increasingly bizarre events involving a boy and his sister when a new family moves in across the street. And in 'Camouflage', Eric Banerjee, an unassuming Adelaide piano tuner, is sent north to the centre of Australia in 1943 to make his contribution to the war effort. 
 
It is clear in all these remarkable stories that Murray Bail - already celebrated for his novels - has also extended the manifold possibilities of short fiction. Each of his stories creates a strange and fascinating new world, and none of them is easily forgotten. Bail's work in this collection is deft, angular, and very entertaining; the mastery of his art is fully revealed with wry humour and haunting power.

The Pages

A beguiling meditation on friendship and love, on men and women, on landscape and the difficulties of thought itself.

The novel's pleasures... mostly reside in its formal arrangement and Bail's brilliantly distilled, and witty prose

A curious and intriguing novel... the brilliant skill of the writing makes the world come alive on the page

A nicely written, wonderfully entertaining novel... Philosophy is a big, difficult subject - there is none bigger - that Bail depicts thoughtfully and with sympathetic humour

Quietly fascinating... Bail's prose is as full of space and glaring, almost painful light as the landscape... This book is as hard and sparse as that landscape, but no less beautiful for that

Bail's highly idiosyncratic style resembles a choppy sea in which phrases and images constantly jostle each other to send up a dazzlingly brilliant spray. In addition, his ability to conjure up a character in a paragraph or even a mere sentence is remarkable

The novel makes no pretence of providing unambiguous answers, but takes us on a beguiling, questing journey

Murray Bail marshals the tensions between his characters and their ideas to great effect

A gratifyingly dry wit pervades this novel of ideas

Murray Bail was born in Adelaide in 1941. He is the author of four novels and two collections of short stories. Harvill Secker published his Notebooks in 2005. His novel Eucalyptus was awarded the 1999 Commonwealth Writers' Prize and the Miles Franklin Literary Award.

What are The Pages? 
 
On a family sheep station in the interior of Australia, a brother and sister work the property while their reclusive brother, Wesley Antill, spends years toiling away in one of the sheds, writing a philosophy. 
 
Now he has died. Erica, a philosopher, is sent from Sydney to appraise his work. Accompanying her is Sophie, who needs a distraction from a string of failed relationships. Her field is psychoanalysis. These two women, each with different views of the world, face a situation they have not experienced before, with surprising results.

Holden's Performance

'The clotted magnificence of this chortling midden of ratbags, pervs and wastrels keeps you reading' - Valentine Cunningham, Observer

Very amusing, ironic and wise... a success, no doubt about it

A novel of epic proportions. It's not merely about characters and events, but also about shapes and landscapes, history and the future, fact and falsehood, light and darkness... He writes with a rare perception of the Australian struggle for a defineable identity in bold, inventive, often wildly funny prose

Shadbolt, Holden. Gender: male. Age: 34. 
Model: Australian. No frills. 
 
Holden's Performance is the sprawling life story of Holden Shadbold: a hilarious all-Australian trajectory from car maniac to cinema bouncer to Prime Ministerial bodyguard. Guileless and matter of fact, Holden is fated to follow the flamboyant people around him- ex-Corporal McBee, who zealously woos Holden's mother; his Uncle Vern, a short-sighted proof -reader with a fondness for eating the morning paper with his cereal; and Harriet, the crippled poster artist, whose twists and curves intersect with Holden's unswervingly straight lines...

Homesickness

Murray Bail is the warmest and most quick-witted of storytellers

It's a pleasure simply to be immersed in Bail's caprice-prone mind

Murray Bail was born in Adelaide in 1941, and now lives in Sydney. He is the author of three novels and a book of short stories, The Drover's Wife and Other Stories. Homesickness, his first novel, won the National Book Award for Australian Literature and the Melbourne Age Book of the Year Award. His subsequent novel, Holden's Performance, won the Vance Palmer Prize for Fiction. Eucalyptus, which was published by Harvill in 1998, was the winner of the 1999 Commonwealth Writers Prize and the Miles Franklin Literary Award.

Thirteen Australian package tourists set off around the world on the holiday of a lifetime. But as they trawl from country to country, through cities and round ever more obscure museums they find nothing as they expect it, least of all themselves. Homesickness is an enchanting novel: a wry, witty look at the ways people interact, a catalogue of comic digressions and tantalising information in which the world becomes a museum with no exhibit more bizarre than human nature itself.

Murray Bail

'A masterpiece. A novel of high seriousness and higher playfulness' Michael Hulse, Spectator 
 
 On a property in New South Wales, a man named Holland lives with his daughter, Ellen. As years pass and Ellen grows into a beautiful young woman, her father announces his decision: she will marry the first man who can name all the eucalypts, down to the last tree. 
 
 As suitors clamber to meet Holland's challenge, Ellen encounters a strange young man among her father's trees - a storyteller, with enchanting tales of faraway lands. 
 
 'Murray Bail is the warmest and quick-witted of storytellers. You will never forget what is at the heart of this book: one of the great and most surprising courtships in literature' Michael Ondaatje

Murray Bail

Eucalyptus

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