The Well: Popular Penguins

(Paperback)

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Description

Driving one night along the deserted track that leads to the farm, Miss Hester Harper and Katherine run into a mysterious creature. They dump the body into the farm's deep well but the voice of the injured intruder will not be stilled and the closer Katherine is drawn to the edge of the well, the farther away she gets from Hester. A twentieth-century Australian classic, The Well is a haunting and wryly humorous tale of memory, desire and loneliness.

Author Bio

Elizabeth Jolley was one of Australia's most celebrated writers, with a formidable international reputation. She was recognised in Australia with an AO for services to literature and was awarded Honorary Doctorates from Curtin University (1986); Macquarie (1995), Queensland (1997) and The University of New South Wales (2000). Born in England in 1923, she was brought up in a strict, German-speaking household and attended a Quaker boarding school. She became a nurse, married Leonard Jolley and with three children moved to Western Australia in 1959. In 1974 she started teaching creative writing at Fremantle Arts Centre. Although she wrote all her life, it was not until she was in her fifties that her books started to receive the recognition they deserved. She won The Age Book of the Year Award on three separate occasions (for Mr Scobie's Riddle, My Father's Moon and The Georges' Wife) and she won the Miles Franklin Award for The Well, as well as many other awards. Her last two novels published by Penguin were An Accommodating Spouse (1999) and An Innocent Gentleman (2001). Her non-fiction collection, Learning to Dance was published in 2006. Elizabeth Jolley died in 2007.