Pages

What are The Pages?On a family sheep station in the interior of Australia, a brother and sister work the property while their reclusive brother, Wesley Antill, spends years toiling away in one of the sheds, writing a philosophy.Now he has died. Erica, a philosopher, is sent from Sydney to appraise his work. Accompanying her is Sophie, who needs a distraction from a string of failed relationships. Her field is psychoanalysis. These two women, each with different views of the world, face a situation they have not experienced before, with surprising results.

The novel's pleasures... mostly reside in its formal arrangement and Bail's brilliantly distilled, and witty prose, A curious and intriguing novel... the brilliant skill of the writing makes the world come alive on the page, A nicely written, wonderfully entertaining novel... Philosophy is a big, difficult subject - there is none bigger - that Bail depicts thoughtfully and with sympathetic humour, Quietly fascinating... Bail's prose is as full of space and glaring, almost painful light as the landscape... This book is as hard and sparse as that landscape, but no less beautiful for that, Bail's highly idiosyncratic style resembles a choppy sea in which phrases and images constantly jostle each other to send up a dazzlingly brilliant spray. In addition, his ability to conjure up a character in a paragraph or even a mere sentence is remarkable

Murray Bail was born in Adelaide in 1941. He is the author of four novels and two collections of short stories. Harvill Secker published his Notebooks in 2005. His novel Eucalyptus was awarded the 1999 Commonwealth Writers' Prize and the Miles Franklin Literary Award.