Vintage International Series

From the image of a small boy entranced by his mother's GI Escort, yet still hoping for the return of a father 'missing in action', to the portrait of an adult writer trying to piece together a defining image of his late father, these outstanding stories conjure up with sharp intensity the memories and events that make a man.

These powerfully vivid stories range over more than a century of Australian life, from green tropical lushness to 'blacksoil country', from scrub and outback to city streets - evoking dark shadows beneath a bright sun, and lives shaped by the ghosts of history and the rhythms of unruly nature.

Fly Away Peter

by David Malouf

Published 7 October 1982

For three very different people brought together by their love for birds, life on the Queensland coast in 1914 is the timeless and idyllic world of sandpipers, ibises and kingfishers. In another hemisphere civilization rushes headlong into a brutal conflict. Life there is lived from moment to moment. Inevitably, the two young men - sanctuary owner and employee - are drawn to the war, and into the mud and horror of the trenches of Armentieres. Alone on the beach, their friend Imogen, the middle-aged wildlife photographer, must acknowledge for all three of them that the past cannot be held.

Child's Play

by David Malouf

Published 13 May 1982

In the streets of an ordinary Italian town, the people go about their everyday lives. In an old apartment block above them, a young man pores over photographs and plans, dedicated to his life's most important project. Day by day, in his imagination, he is rehearsing for his greatest performance. Yet when his moment comes, nothing could have prepared him for what happens...

The Great World

by David Malouf

Published 9 April 1990

The Great World gives a voice to the Australian experience of war; of the young men who have enlisted to fight other people's battles. Ranging over 70 years of Australian life, it is a novel of self-knowledge and lost innocence, of survival and witness.

An Imaginary Life

by David Malouf

Published 7 September 1978

In the first century A.D., Publius Ovidius Naso, the most urbane and irreverent poet of imperial Rome, was banished to a remote village on the edge of the Black Sea. From these sparse facts, Malouf has fashioned an audacious and supremely moving novel. Marooned on the edge of the known world, exiled from his native tongue, Ovid depends on the kindness of barbarians who impale their dead and converse with the spirit world.Then he becomes the guardian of a still more savage creature, a feral child who has grown up among deer. What ensues is a luminous encounter between civilization and nature, as enacted by a poet who once cataloged the treacheries of love and a boy who slowly learns how to give it.

"A work of unusual intelligence and imagination, full of surprising images and insights...One of those rare books you end up underlining and copying out into notebooks and reading out loud to friends."--The New York Times Book Review

Remembering Babylon

by David Malouf

Published 27 March 1993

A searing and magnificent picture of Australia at the moment of its foundation, with early settlers staking out their small patch of land and terrified by the harsh and alien continent. Focussing on the hostility between the early British inhabitants and the native Aborigines. Remembering Bablyon tells the tragic and compelling story of a boy who finds himself caught between the two worlds. Shot through with humour, and written with the poetic intensity that characterised Malouf's An Imaginary Life, this is a novel of epic scope yet it is simple, compassionate and universal: a classic.

Ransom

by David Malouf

Published 5 November 2009

What happens when a young prince falls in battle and his body is spirited away to be desecrated and dishonoured? His death is the battle price of another young man's death, but what price dishonour and a father's grief? In this exquisite gem of a novel, David Malouf shines new light on Homer's "Iliad", adding twists and reflections, as well as flashes of earthy humour, to surprise and enchant. His version opens with Achilles, maddened by grief at the death of his friend Patroclus. From the walls of Troy, King Priam watches the body of his son Hector being dragged behind Achilles' chariot. There must be a way, he thinks, of reclaiming the body - of pitting compromise against heroics, new ways against the old, and of forcing the hand of fate. Dressed simply and in a cart pulled by a mule, an old man sets off for the Greek camp...Lyrical, immediate and heartbreaking, Malouf's fable engraves the epic themes of the Trojan war onto a perfect miniature - themes of war and heroics, hubris and humanity, chance and fate, the bonds between soldiers, fathers and sons, all newly burnished and brilliantly recast for our times.

The Conversations at Curlow Creek

by David Malouf

Published 14 January 1997

A new work of fiction by the author of Remembering Babylon. It is 1827, and, in a remote hut high on the plains of New South Wales, two strangers spend the night in talk. One, an illiterate Irishman, and ex-convict and bushranger, is to be hanged at dawn. The other is the police officer who has been sent to supervise the hanging. As the night wears on, the two men share memories and uncover unlikely connections between their lives. 240 pp. Author tour. 20,000 print.

The Complete Stories

by David Malouf

Published 24 July 2007

In this stunning collection, internationally acclaimed writer David Malouf gives us bookish boys and taciturn men, strong women and wayward sons, fathers and daughters, lovers and husbands, a composer and his muse. These are their stories, whole lives brought dramatically into focus and powerfully rooted in the vividly rendered landscape of the vast Australian continent. Malouf writes about men and women looking for something they seem to have missed, or missed out on, puzzling over not only their own lives but also the place they have come to occupy in the lives of others. This single volume gathers both a new collection of Malouf's short fiction, Every Move You Make, and all of his previously published stories.