Nobel Prize winner Patrick White's masterpiece, The Eye of the Storm, the basis for the film starring Charlotte Rampling, Judy Davies, and Geoffrey Rush. In White's 1973 classic, terrifying matriarch Elizabeth Hunter is facing death while her impatient children-Sir Basil, the celebrated actor, and Princess de Lascabane, an adoptive French aristocrat-wait. It is the dying mother who will command attention, and who in the midst of disaster will look into the eye of the storm. "An antipodean King Lear writ gentle and tragicomic, almost Chekhovian . . . The Eye of the Storm [is] an intensely dramatic masterpiece" ( The Australian).

Patrick White was born in England in 1912 to Australian parents and was educated in London. He is the author of twelve novels, including Voss (1957), Riders in the Chariot (1961), and The Vivisector (1970). In 1973, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature. He died in September 1990.