Landscape of Farewell

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Description

The story of Max Otto, an elderly German academic. After the death of his beloved wife and his recognition that he will never write the great study of history that was to be his life's crowning work, Max believes his life is all but over. Everything changes, though, when his valedictory lecture is challenged by Professor Vita McLelland, a feisty young Australian Aboriginal academic visiting Germany. Their meeting and growing friendship sets Max on a journey that would have seemed unthinkable just a few short weeks earlier. When, at Vita's invitation, Max travels to Australia, he forms a deep friendship with her uncle, Aboriginal elder Dougald Gnapun. It is a friendship that not only gives new meaning and purpose to Max, but which teaches him the profound importance of truth-telling in reconciliation with his own and his country's past.

Reviews

Alex Miller is a wonderful writer, one that Australia has been keeping secret from the rest of us for too long. Landscape of Farewell is at once elegiac and bracing and, as always, limpidly written. -- John Banville
Landscape of Farewell provides a compelling account of interactions between past and present... with luminous descriptions of place, dryly matter-of-fact evocations of character and incident, and humorous affectation for human foibles and perverseness... By the end of the novel we are glad to have known its numerous characters. * Times Literary Supplement *

Author Bio

Alex Miller has twice won the prestigious Miles Franklin Literary Award, Australia's premier literary prize; the first occasion in 1993 for The Ancestor Game, and again in 2003 for Journey to the Stone Country. He is also an overall winner of the Commonwealth Writers' Prize, for The Ancestor Game, in 1993. British by birth, he now lives in Victoria.