The Plains

‘A man travels to Australia's interior plains planning to make a film about the region's people and culture, but mostly he ruminates in this wry, evocative novel….Murnane touches on foibles and philosophy, plays with the makings of a fable or allegory, and all the while toys with tone, moving easily from earnest to deadpan to lightly ironic…A provocative, delightful, diverting must-reread.’—Kirkus Reviews [starred];
‘One of Australia’s most important writers.'—Publishers Weekly
‘A distinguished, distinctive, unforgettable novel.’—Shirley Hazzard;
‘A piece of imaginative writing so remarkably sustained that it is a subject for meditation rather than a mere reading … In the depths and surfaces of this extraordinary fable you will see your inner self eerily reflected again and again.’—Sydney Morning Herald;
‘Widely regarded as Australia’s greatest living writer, Murnane has long cultivated an air of myth and geographical limit…One could fill a room with a conversation about him.’—Full Stop;
‘Known for its sharp yet defamiliarizing take on the landscape and an aesthetic of purity historically associated with it, The Plains is uniformly described as a masterpiece of Australian literature. Look closer, though, and it’s a haunting nineteenth-century novel of colonial violence captured inside the machine’s test-pattern image—a distant, unassuming house on the plains.’—BOMB;