Landscape with Landscape – Gerald Murnane

Five of the six stories in Landscape with Landscape trace a suburban journey in the 1960s, as the writer negotiates the conflicting demands of Catholicism and sex, self-consciousness and intimacy, alcohol and literature. In the sixth story a Paraguayan man imagines a country called Australia, while his son sickens before his eyes. ‘Murnane is unlike anyone else, the sort of writer who demands to be read in a new way but, above all, demands to be read.’ Brian Evenson, Chicago Review of Books‘The emotional conviction . . . is so intense, the sombre lyricism so moving, the intelligence behind the chiselled sentences so undeniable, that we suspend all disbelief.’ J. M. Coetzee