Search Results: FICTION - AUSTRALIAN from Bookhome Sydney

London: Chatto & Windus, 1985. 1st ed.. Hardback small octavo, dustjacket, very good condition (in very good dustjacket), minor edgewear jacket, light foxing edges, pages lightly toned, minor edgewear. 160 pp. The first collection of short stories by David Malouf. These short stories evoke compassion and awake the emotions, and the excitement of adolescence. The melancholy threads that tie Australian immigrants to the Europe they came from, and the sad, nostalgic power with which, as time goes by, we endow the ordinary objects of daily life. The title refers to the fundamental opposites with which these fascinating stories are concerned: darkness and light, life and death, youth and age, men and women, intimate affections and random, imminent violence. The author has combined a vivid, passionate delight in life with a bleak but consoling awareness of the nearness of death, and the darkness all around, to write a humane, moving and vital collection of stories.