Alex Miller

''An amazing book. The reader can''t help but offer up a prayerful thank you: Thank you, God, that human beings still have the audacity to write like this.'' The Washington Post.- With university behind her, Emily Stanton finds herself on the threshold of life. Introduced to a Scottish engineer, the exoticism of his life in Paris beckons, and she leaves her family home in 1920s Melbourne to become his wife. But far from providing answers, her conventional marriage awakens in her an ardent desire to find a reason for living beyond that of simply wife and mother. This desire leads her to flirt with risk, passion and unorthodox friendships, and carries her to Tunisia on a journey of self-questioning and intellectual reawakening. Conditions of Faith is both a provocative romance and an elegant meditation on a timeless dilemma. Impetuous yet entirely sympathetic, Emily Stanton, like Henry James'' Isabel Archer, is in search of a reason for living in a society where motherhood is deemed reason enough. This mesmerising and thought-provoking story of dreams, obsessions and destiny will hold you in thrall.

Autumn Laing seduce a Pat Donlon con sus piernas nacaradas y sus ansias de vida y arte. Al hacerlo, no sólo compromete la confianza y el amor que comparte con su marido, Arthur, sino que roba el futuro a la joven y guapa esposa de Pat, Edith, y al hijo que ambos esperan. Cincuenta y tres años despues, cascarrabias, atractiva e incontenible, Autumn, con ochenta y cinco años, queda horrorizada al descubrir en su fuero interno la poderosa necesidad de reparar su error. Cuando comienza a contar su historia, escribe: Todos han muerto, y yo estoy vieja y demacrada como un esqueleto. Aqui es donde comenzo Escrita con compasion e inteligencia, esta energica, sensible y apasionada novela va desnudando la narracion para preguntar que relacion guarda esta con la verdad. La ultima tentacion de Autumn Laing es un retrato estoicamente intimo de una mujer inolvidable, llena de pintorescos recuerdos y con una poderosa necesidad de redencion.

The masterful Australian novelist turns his hand to the most universal of subjects: love. 'It takes a very good writer indeed to get away with a title such as Lovesong, and Alex Miller does it triumphantly.' - John Banville Like the truly great novelist he is, Miller locates the heart of his story in the moral frailties and secret passions of his all-too-human characters.

Winner of the 2001 Christina Stead Prize for FictionFrom the Author of Miles Franklin Literary Award and Commonwealth Writers Prize Winner With university behind her, Emily Stanton finds herself on the threshold of life. Introduced to a Scottish engineer, the exoticism of his life in Paris beckons, and she leaves her family home in 1920s Melbourne to become his wife. But far from providing answers, her conventional marriage awakens in her an ardent desire to find a reason for living beyond that of simply wife and mother. This desire leads her to flirt with risk, passion and unorthodox friendships, and carries her to Tunisia on a journey of self-questioning and intellectual reawakening.Conditions of Faith is both a provocative romance and an elegant meditation on a timeless dilemma. Impetuous yet entirely sympathetic, Emily Stanton, like Henry James Isabel Archer, is in search of a reason for living in a society where motherhood is deemed reason enough. This mesmerising and thought-provoking story of dreams, obsessions and destiny will hold you in thrall.

Steven Muir, August Spiess and his daughter Gertrude, and Lang Tzu all acknowledge a restless sense of cultural displacement, an ambivalence in their relations with the culture of European Australia. Steven left England for Australia as a young man and his one attempt at returning is unsuccessful. August Spiess, although he speaks frequently of returning to his native Hamburg, fails to make the journey, as does his daughter Gertrude. Lang Tzus very name defines his fate: two characters which in Mandarin signify the son who goes away.The game, however, does have winners. For despite their yearnings for the home of their ancestral dreams, a desire to belong somewhere that is truly their own, none of Millers characters leaves Australia, and each in their own way comes to see that to be at home in exile may be a defining paradox of the European Australian condition: the paradox of belonging and estrangement that perhaps lies uneasily at the heart of all European cultures.

Landscape of Farewell is the story of Max Otto, an elderly German academic. After the death of his much-loved wife and his recognition that he will never write the great study of history that was to be his lifes crowning work, Max believes his life is all but over. Everything changes, though, when his valedictory lecture is challenged by Professor Vita McLelland, a feisty young Australian Aboriginal academic visiting Germany. Their meeting and growing friendship sets Max on a journey that would have seemed unthinkable just a few short weeks earlier.When, at Vitas invitation, Max travels to Australia, he forms a deep friendship with her uncle, Aboriginal elder Dougald Gnapun. It is a friendship that not only gives new meaning and purpose to Max, but which teaches him the profound importance of truth-telling in reconciliation with his own and his countrys past.

His beauty and aloofness disturbed the equilibrium of the Rankin family...The stockman for a long time offered a resistance to the efforts of the members of the family to involve him in their lives. He moved about in their familiar world, observing it with unfamiliar eyes; and quietly, industriously he slowly rearranged it.Ward Rankin had not wanted to be tied to the station; hed imagined a life of travel and experience but there was no-one else. When his mother died, it came to him - owner and manager, now in his fifties, a frustrated man. Ida, his young wife, sees a solution to her own discontent in her growing feelings for the young English stockman Robert Crofts, whose arrival on the station changes their lives forever. Set in the remote Central Highlands of Queensland against a backdrop of heat, torrential rain and the strange and lonely landscape, this is a novel of passion, suspense, reinvention and revenge, watched over by the solitary presence of Mt Mooloolong.

Winner of the 2011 Christina Stead Prize for FictionWinner of The Age Book of the YearWinner of thePeoples Choice Award at the NSW Premiers Literary AwardsStrangers did not, as a rule, find their way to Chez Dom, a small, rundown Tunisian cafe on Pariss distant fringes run by the widow Houria and her young niece, Sabiha. But when one day a lost Australian tourist, John Patterner, seeks shelter in the cafe from a sudden Parisian rainstorm, a love story starts to unfold. John and Sabihas becomes a contented but unlikely marriage-a marriage of two cultures lived in a third-and yet because they are essentially foreigners to each other, their love story sets in train an irrevocable course of tragic events. Years later, living a small, quiet life in suburban Melbourne, what happened to them in Paris seems like a distant, troubling dream to John. He confides the story behind their seemingly ordinary lives to Ken, an ageing, melancholic writer who sees in his neighbours the possibility of one last simple love story.Told with Millers distinctive clarity, intelligence and compassion, Lovesong is a pitch-perfect novel, a tender and enthralling story about the intimate lives of ordinary people. Like the truly great novelist he is, Miller locates the heart of his story in the moral frailties and secret passions of his all-too-human characters.

Robert Crofts, a young Englishman, arrives in Australia in the 1950s, determined to inhabit the outback. After five years of life on the land, he makes his way to Melbourne where, living in a boarding house, working as a cleaner, he finds himself consumed by a burning need to read, write, draw, create. When he meets the enigmatic Lena, she instantly becomes his staunchest champion but as their tortured marriage evolves and gradually erodes she ultimately becomes an obstacle.This intensely autobiographical novel has much to say about the compulsion to create, and the fundamental unknowability of even our most intimate partners. As the reader sinks into the text of this singular book, the artifice of fiction gradually melts away, leaving nothing but truth on the page. In The Passage of Love Alex Miller has given us a masterful work which will come to define his career as one of the great writers of our time.

What is true for one relationship, for one painting, is not true for another... each possesses its own strange inevitability that resists us and we can never finally know what it is we are doing until the work is finished... It is as if the picture paints itself through us, the story tells itself through us, has a larger existence of which we know nothing...Toni Powlett is an artist in the grip of a crisis. Since the death of his father, Moniek Prochownik, four years earlier, Toni has been at a creative standstill - until Marina Golding, the wife of his former teacher and mentor, Robert Schwartz, contacts him, and everything changes. Toni finds in Marina the perfect companion for his life in art and his creative energies are re-awakened.But Tonis newfound inspiration and artistic energy come at the direct expense of his relationship with his wife and daughter. The more dependent for his art he becomes on Marina, the more potentially destructive become the tensions between himself and his wife, Teresa. Tonis dilemma is how to reconcile the transgressive nature of his imaginative life with the daily life of his family, who he loves. Robert Schwartzs dying father, Theo, warns him not to confuse art with life. But by what means is he to achieve such clear-sightedness?Immensely satisfying, Prochowniks Dream is a work of great subtlety, strength and intellect. Its examination of the artist at work is complex and completely absorbing. But at its heart, very simply, it is a book about love.

Betrayed by her husband, Annabelle Beck retreats from Melbourne to her old family home in tropical North Queensland where she meets Bo Rennie, one of the Jangga tribe. Intrigued by Bos claim that he holds the key to her future, Annabelle sets out with him on a path of recovery that leads back to her childhood and into the Janggas ancient heartland, where their grandparents lives begin to yield secrets that will challenge the possibility of their happiness together.With the consummate artistry of a novelist working at the height of his powers, Miller convinces us that the stone country is not only a remote and exotic location in North Queensland, but is also an unvisited place within each of us. Journey to the Stone Country confirms Millers reputation as one of Australias most intelligent and uncompromising writers.

Based on the lives of real people in Somerset on the borders of Exmoor, Miller tells his own story of a young labourer swept up in the adventure of riding second horse in a west country stag hunt. Finding himself in a closed social system in which he has neither status nor power, the young man identifies with the aberrant Tivington nott stag, which, despite its lack of antlers, has become a legend in the district for its ability to elude the hunt and to compete successfully with the antlered stags in the rut.

From one of Australias greatest novelists comes this fine collection, a storytellers journey. These short stories and essays, written over the last forty years, comprise an insightful and intelligent meditation on the life of the novelist and the culture of contemporary Australia. Personal and intimate as many of these pieces are, this collection forms a kind of assured autobiography, of the sort that only Alex Miller could write.Alex Millers stories are told with a rare level of wisdom and profundity, engaging the intellect and the emotions simultaneously. Stories are, after all, in his blood.

Autumn Laing seduces Pat Donlon with her lust for life and art. In doing so she not only compromises the trusting love she has with her husband, Arthur, she also steals the future from Pats young and beautiful wife, Edith, and their unborn child. Fifty-three years later, cantankerous, engaging, unrestrainable 85-year-old Autumn is shocked to find within herself a powerful need for redemption. As she tells her story, she writes, They are all dead and I am old and skeleton-gaunt. This is where it began...Written with compassion and intelligence, this energetic, funny and wise novel peels back the layers of storytelling and asks what truth has to do with it. Autumn Laing is an unflinchingly intimate portrait of a woman and her time - she is unforgettable.

A sensuously written, peculiar novel about the relationship between a painter and his subject.A narrow, vertical painting, tightly enclosing the scene. Her pale arm and her pale thigh. Viewed at a diagonal through an exceedingly tall doorway . . . just a glimpse of something . . . An ageing portrait artist meets a woman who unsettles him, yet inspires him to paint her. Reluctantly, at first, they are drawn together. The ambiguity of the relationship between painter and subject is revealed through Alex Millers subtle, sensuous narrative. The artist must watch and wait to trap the shy beast. For the skill of portraiture is in seeing beyond the face, beyond the likeness.

WINNER OF THE 2014 VICTORIAN PREMIERS LITERARY AWARD FOR FICTIONLONGLISTED FOR THE 2014 IMPAC DUBLIN LITERARY AWARDSSHORTLISTED FOR THE 2014 PRIME MINISTERS LITERARY AWARDS AND THESHORTLISTED FOR THE 2014 ALS GOLD MEDAL SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2014QUEENSLAND LITERARY AWARDS SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2014WESTERN AUSTRALIAN PREMIERS BOOK AWARDSWhen his father dies, Bobby Blue decides to leave the Mount Hay cattle station where they worked side by side and take a job in town as the new constables offsider. Daniel, the constable, his wife Esme and their two girls, Irie and Miriam, are new to the western country and, struggling to understand its inhabitants, invite Bobby to stay in a hut on their property where he is educated alongside their daughters.But theres a simmering tension, building quietly and strongly, beneath the overt goodwill. And when first Irie then Miriam become involved in a dispute that threatens violence, theres an abrupt and ruthless change in attitude from Daniel and Esme towards Bobby.When tragedy strikes at Coal Creek the true nature of the perceived friendship is laid bare with consequences that will haunt Bobby for decades.