Grand Days

(Paperback)

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Description

Meet Edith Campbell Berry, the woman all Australian women would like to be. 'Any of Frank Moorhouse's books are rewarding and stimulating. But his trilogy following a young Australian diplomat at the founding of the League of Nations is a masterpiece. In Edith Campbell Berry, his heroine, he created one of the enduring characters in literature. The trilogy is Grand Days, Dark Palace and Cold Light. All are must reads.' - Michael Williams, Qantas magazine On a train from Paris to Geneva, Edith Campbell Berry meets Major Ambrose Westwood in the dining car, makes his acquaintance over a lunch of six courses, and allows him to kiss her passionately.Their early intimacy binds them together once they reach Geneva and their posts at the newly created League of Nations. There, a heady idealism prevails over Edith and her young colleagues, and nothing seems beyond their grasp, certainly not world peace. The exuberance of the times carries over into Geneva nights- Edith is drawn into a dark and glamorous underworld where, coaxed by Ambrose, she becomes more and more sexually adventurous. Reading Grand Days is a rare experience- it is vivid and wise, full of shocks of recognition and revelation. The final effect of the book is intoxicating and unplaceably original.

Author Bio

Frank Moorhouse was born in the coastal town of Nowra, NSW. He worked as an editor of small-town newspapers and as an administrator and in the 1970s became a full-time writer. He has written fiction, non fiction, screenplays and essays and edited many collections of writing. Forty-Seventeen was given a laudatory full-page review by Angela Carter in the New York Times and was named Book of the Year by the Age and 'moral winner' of the Booker Prize by the London magazine Blitz. Grand Days, the first novel in The Edith Trilogy, won the SA Premier's Award for Fiction. Dark Palace won the Miles Franklin Literary Award and was shortlisted for the NSW Premier's Literary Award, the Victorian Premier's Literary Award and the Age Book of the Year Award. Cold Light was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin and Barbara Jefferis Awards. Frank has undertaken numerous fellowships and his work has been translated into several languages. He was made a member of the Order of Australia for services to literature in 1985 and was awarded an honorary doctorate from Griffith University in 1997.