- Title:
-
Eucalyptus
- Written by:
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Murray Bail
- Read by:
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Humphrey Bower
- Format:
-
Unabridged CD Audio Book
- Number of CDs:
-
6
- Duration:
-
7 hours 35 minutes
- Published:
-
March 01 2012
- Available Date:
-
January 28 2012
- Age Category:
-
Adult
- ISBN:
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9781743111512
- Genres:
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Fiction; Australian Fiction; Family Sagas; Psychological Fiction
- Publisher:
-
ABC Audio
Qty
Format
Price
Bolinda price
Winner ALS Gold Medal 1998
Winner Miles Franklin Literary Award 1999
Winner The Commonwealth Writer's Prize 1999
"...it's a pleasure simply to be immersed in Bail's caprice-prone mind."
The New York Times Book Review
"Curious power is precisely what this novel delivers. Part of its charm is its style, the quirky sentences that rarely go where we expect, the sinister Arthur Machenesque beauty of the landscape descriptions, the meandering stories that fail to deliver their expected allegories, that never really end but instead begin others."
The Washington Post
“One of the great and most surprising courtships in literature.”
Michael Ondaatje
A man called Holland, living on a remote estate in New South Wales, planted on his land a collection of all eucalyptus trees known to man. He then set, for his beautiful and only daughter Ellen, one of those traps essential to fairy tales: only a man who could correctly name each tree in his vast collection could have her hand in marriage.
On a country property a man named Holland lives with his daughter Ellen. Over the years, as she grows into a beautiful young woman, he plants hundreds of different gum trees on his land. When Ellen is nineteen her father announces his decision: she will marry the man who can name all the species of eucalypt, down to the last tree.
Suitors emerge from all corners, including the formidable, straight-backed Mr Cave, world expert on the varieties of eucalypt. And then, walking among her father’s trees, Ellen chances on a strange young man who in the days that follow tells her dozens of stories set in cities, deserts, faraway countries...
Haunting and mesmerising, Eucalyptus illuminates the nature of storytelling itself.
"Whatever the source of Bail's peculiar magic, Eucalyptus casts a spell that will carry readers from first page to last and leave them wishing for a thousand and one more stories just like it."
Amazon