'A masterpiece. A novel of high seriousness and higher playfulness' Michael Hulse, Spectator
On a property in New South Wales, a man named Holland lives with his daughter, Ellen. As years pass and Ellen grows into a beautiful young woman, her father announces his decision: she will marry the first man who can name all the eucalypts, down to the last tree.
As suitors clamber to meet Holland's challenge, Ellen encounters a strange young man among her father's trees - a storyteller, with enchanting tales of faraway lands.
'Murray Bail is the warmest and quick-witted of storytellers. You will never forget what is at the heart of this book: one of the great and most surprising courtships in literature' Michael Ondaatje
Autorentext
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.