A man moves from a capital city to a remote town in the border country, where he intends to spend the last years of his life. It is time, he thinks, to review the spoils of a lifetime of seeing, a lifetime of reading. Which sights, people, books, fictional characters, turns of phrase and lines of verse will survive into the twilight? Feeling an increasing urgency to put his mental landscape in order, the man sets to work cataloguing his memories, little knowing what secrets they will yield and where his `report' will lead.Border Districts is a jewel of a farewell from one of the greatest living writers of English prose. Winner of the Australian 2018 Prime Minister's Literary Award and shortlisted for the 2018 Miles Franklin Award, this is Murnane's first work to be published in the UK in thirty years.

Inland is a work which gathers in emotional power as it moves across the grasslands of its narrator's imagination--from Szolnok County on the great plains of Hungary where a man writes in the library of his manor house, to the Institute of Prairie Studies in Tripp County, South Dakota, where the editor of the journal Hinterland receives his writing, to the narrator's own native district in Melbourne County, between Moonee Ponds and the Merri, where he recalls the constant displacements of his childhood. "No thing in the world is one thing," he declares; "some places are many more than one place." These overlapping worlds are bound by recurring motifs--fish pond, fig-tree, child-woman, the colours white, red and green--and by deep feelings of intimacy and betrayal, which are brought to full expression as the book moves to its close.

Clement Killeaton transforms his father's gambling, his mother's piety, his fellow pupils' cruelty and the mysterious but forbidden attractions of sex into an imagined world centred on horse-racing and played out in the dusty backyard of his home, across the landscapes of the district, and the continent of Australia. An unsparing evocation of a Catholic childhood in a country town in the late 1940s, Tamarisk Row's lyrical prose is charged with the yearning, boredom, fear and fascination of boyhood. First published in Australia in 1974, and previously unpublished in the UK, Tamarisk Row is Gerald Murnane's debut novel, and in many respects his masterpiece.

In the first days of spring in his eighty-second year, Gerald Murnane--perhaps the greatest living writer of English prose--began a project that would round off his strange career as a novelist. He would read all of his books in turn and prepare a report on each. His original intention was to lodge the reports in two of his legendary filing cabinets: in the Chronological Archive, which documents his life as a whole, and the Literary Archive, which is devoted to everything he has written. As the reports grew, however, they themselves took on the form of a book, a book as beguiling and hallucinatory, in its way, as the works on which they were meant to report. These miniature memoirs or stories lead the reader through the capacious territory Murnane refers to as his mind: they dwell on the circumstances that gave rise to his writing, on images and associations, on Murnane's own theories of fiction, and then memories of a deeply personal kind. The final essay is, of course, on Last Letter to a Reader itself: it considers the elation and exhilaration that accompany the act of writing, and offers a moving finale to what must surely be Murnane's last work, as death approaches. "Help me, dear one," he writes, "to endure patiently my going back to my own sort of heaven."

Fiction. Born in Melbourne, Austrailia, in 1939, Gerald Murnane recently retired as the senior lecturer in fiction writing at Deakin University with a reputation as one of the finest writers in his country. He is the author of seven highly praised books of fiction, most of which are still widely unknown and underappreciated by American readers. "The Plains is parable, fable, allegory, analogue, mythology, and vision. It is also subtly satirical and often ingeniously funny . . . Gerald Murnane is unquestionably one of the most original writers working in Australia today and THE PLAINS is a fascinating and rewarding book"--The Australian. Foreword by Andrew Zawacki, editor of VERSE magazine. The Plains was first published in Austrailia in 1982.

A kaleidoscopic meditation on the glories and pitfalls of storytelling. "The house of fiction," wrote Henry James, "has . . . not one window, but a million." Gerald Murnane takes these words as his starting point, and asks: Who, exactly, are that house's residents, and what do they see from their respective rooms? Focusing on the importance of trust and the ever-present risk of betrayal in writing as in life, these nested stories explore the fraught relationships between author and reader, child and parent, boyfriend and girlfriend, husband and wife. Murnane's fiction is woven from images -- the reflections of the setting sun on distant windowpanes, seemingly limitless grasslands, a procession of dark-haired women, a clearing in a forest, the colors indigo and silver-grey, and the mysterious death of a young woman -- which build to an emotional climax that is all the more powerful for the intricacy of its patterning.