Eucalyptus by Murray Bail

1999 Winner of the Miles Franklin Award and the Commonwealth Writers Prize.
On a property in western New South Wales a man named Holland lives with his daughter Ellen. Over the years, as she grows into a beautiful young woman, he plants hundreds of different gum trees on his land. When Ellen is nineteen her father announces his decision: she will marry the man who can name all his species of eucalyptus, down to the last tree… Eucalyptus is a modern fairy tale and an unpredictable love story. Haunting and mesmeric, it illuminates the nature of story-telling itself.

“Wonderful… brilliantly told… a moving, exhilarating love story.” Australian

The author of “Homesickness” returns with his eagerly awaited book about a man who promises his daughter’s hand to any suitor who can name every species of eucalypt planted on his land. Haunting and mesmeric, it illuminates the nature of story-telling itself. Miles Franklin Winner 1999.

About the Author: Murray Bail was born in Adelaide in 1941. Homesickness, his first novel, won the National Book Award for Australian Literature and the Melbourne Age Book of the Year Award. Holden’s Performance, first published in 1988, won the Vance Palmer Prize for Fiction. Eucalyptus was the winner of the Commonwealth Writers Prize and the Miles Franklin Literary Award. Murray Bail’s non-fiction includes an acclaimed monograph on the work of the painter Ian Fairweather and Longhand, A Writer’s Notebook.

01 Nov 1998
 

Eucalyptus by Murray Bail ISBN 9781875847945