Clement Killeaton transforms his father's gambling, his mother's piety, his fellow pupils' cruelty and the mysterious but forbidden attractions of sex into an imagined world centred on horse-racing and played out in the dusty backyard of his home, across the landscapes of the district, and the continent of Australia. An unsparing evocation of a Catholic childhood in a country town in the late 1940s, Tamarisk Row's lyrical prose is charged with the yearning, boredom, fear and fascination of boyhood.
First published in Australia in 1974, and previously unpublished in the UK, Tamarisk Row is Gerald Murnane's debut novel, and in many respects his masterpiece.
Industry Reviews
`The greatest living English-language writer most people have never heard of . . . The next Nobel Laureate in Literature.' New York Times Magazine`Murnane, a genius, is a worthy heir to Beckett.' Teju Cole ---- `An image in Murnane's prose has the quality of an image in colored glass: One both sees the image and sees through the image simultaneously.' Benjamin H. Ogden. New York Times ---- `Murnane's writing is carefully, thoughtfully worded, his deliberations seemingly open, even as there's obviously much more hidden care and attention behind it:' M.A.Orthofer ---- `The seventy-eight-year-old Nobel Prize contender writes like a clockmaker: every sentence is a finely tooled cog, every book an exquisite machine.' Australian Book Review ---- `Impressive, sustained attention is paid to this strange dream-zone of childhood' -- Claire Lowdon, Sunday Times ---- `An authentically modernist novel ... Its themes, as well as its technique, place him in the tradition of Katherine Mansfield and James Joyce' - Jon Day, The Guardian ---- 'Tamarisk Row is a remarkably acute portrayal of what it is to be a bullied, confused boy, while Border Districts is dazzling for its austerity, its cruel purity. Their sentences ring in the ear, and the novels stay with you.' - Daniel Swift, The Spectator ---- 'From a boy following Bassett Creek to an old man patrolling the borderlands, Murnane's books are expeditions that encompass a territory unlike any other.' - Chris Powers, New Statesman ---- `Murnane's fantasies are many-layered, and the narration weaves between these and his mundane life in thrillingly long, lyrical sentences.' Christian Lorentzen, London Review of Books
