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The Burnt Ones

The Burnt Ones

Summary

Eleven stories to which Patrick White brings his immense understanding of the urges which lie just beneath the facade of ordinary human relationships, especially those between men and women. A girl beset by her mother's influence, who marries her father's friend. . . A young man strangely moved into marriage with a girl like the mother who never understood him. . . A pretty market researcher who learns the ultimate details of love with a difference. . . The collector of bird-calls who unwittingly records the call of a very human nature.

Reviews

  • Intensely original, dsturbing.
    Sunday Telegraph

About the author

Patrick White

Patrick White was born in England in 1912 and taken to Australia, where his father owned a sheep farm, when he was six months old. He was educated in England at Cheltenham college and King's College, Cambridge. He settled in London, where he wrote several unpublished novels, then served in the RAF during the war. He returned to Australia after the war.
He became the most considerable figure in modern Australian literature, awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1973. The great poet of Australian landscape, he turned its vast empty spaces into great mythic landscapes of the soul. His position as a man of letters was controversial, provoked by his acerbic, unpredictable public statements and his belief that it is eccentric individuals who offer the only hope of salvation. He died in September 1990.
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