Holden's Performance
By (Author) Murray Bail
Text Publishing
The Text Publishing Company
3rd May 1999
Australia
General
Fiction
A823
Paperback
374
Width 132mm, Height 198mm, Spine 28mm
356g
Holden's Performance is the sprawling tale of Holden Shadbolt, a guileless and matter-of-fact man, as he passes through the cities and landscapes of Australia. He follows the flamboyant people around him - ex-corporal Frank 'Bloodnut' McBee who woos Holden's mother; his uncle Vern, a shortsighted proofreader with a weakness for eating newspaper with his breakfast cereal; and the crippled artist Harriet, whose twists and curves intersect Holden's own unswervingly straight lines ...
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.