Eucalyptus
By (Author) Murray Bail
Text Publishing
The Text Publishing Company
1st November 1998
New edition
Australia
General
Fiction
A823
Winner of Miles Franklin Literary Award 1999 (Australia)
Paperback
264
Width 138mm, Height 210mm
1999 Winner of the Miles Franklin Award and the Commonwealth Writers Prize. On a property in western New South Wales a man named Holland lives with his daughter Ellen. Over the years, as she grows into a beautiful young woman, he plants hundreds of different gum trees on his land. When Ellen is nineteen her father announces his decision- she will marry the man who can name all his species of eucalyptus, down to the last tree...Eucalyptus is a modern fairy tale and an unpredictable love story. Haunting and mesmeric, it illuminates the nature of story-telling itself. "Wonderful...brilliantly told...a moving, exhilarating love story." Australian
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.