The Pages

On a family sheep station in western New South Wales, a brother and sister work the property while their reclusive brother, Wesley Antill, spends years toiling away in one of the sheds, writing his philosophy.

Now he has died. Erica, a philosopher, is sent from Sydney to appraise his life's work. Accompanying her is Sophie, who needs distracting from a string of failed relationships. Her field is psychoanalysis.

The pages Wesley wrote lie untouched in the shed, just as he left them. What will they reveal? Was he a genius? These turn out to be only a couple of the questions in the air. How will the visit change the lives of Erica and Sophie?

The Pages is a beguiling meditation on friendship and love, on men and women, on landscape and the difficulties of thought itself, by one of Australia's greatest novelists, the author of the much-loved Eucalyptus.

Born in Adelaide in 1941, Murray Bail now lives in Sydney. Bail's short stories have been published widely both in Australia and the UK, and have appeared in the New Yorker magazine. His first novel, Homesickness (1980), won two major literary awards: the National Book Council Award for Australian literature and the Age Book of the Year Award. His much-loved novel Eucalyptus was the winner of the Commonwealth Writers Prize and The Miles Franklin Award. His most recent, acclaimed books are Holden's Performance and The Pages.

'A curious and intriguing novel of contraries, whose central theme is the opposition between philosophy and psychology. Murray Bail plays a laconic, self-concealing game, cunningly luring the reader in to his interlinked stories...The spell is most powerfully cast in the brilliant quiet skill of the writing, which can make the world come alive on the page, as in this startling, one-paragraph storm.' Hermione Lee, Guardian UK

'The most extraordinary piece of fiction published in this country this year.' Monthly

'[An] extremely sophisticated novel of ideas...The novel's structure is a pattern of interleaved reflection, story and philosophical speculation about love and being, grief and understanding...It is a novel of questions, of irreconcilables, of eccentricity and of elusive wisdom.' Sydney Morning Herald

'The Pages is a nicely written, wonderfully entertaining novel with optional depths about the discoveries of an Australian who devotes his adult life to an introspective search for truth. ... Philosophy is a big, difficult subject—there is none bigger—that Bail depicts thoughtfully and with sympathetic humour.' Telegraph

'One of the finest and most sensitive meditations on the condition of being I know of. At times the human condition is remarked in a manner as finely observed as it is in the best of Rilke's prose.' Alex Miller, Age