Tourmaline is an isolated Western Australian mining town - a place of heat and dust, as allegorical as it is real. Out of the desert staggers a young diviner, Michael Random, offering salvation to this parched town. The once comatose community is indeed stirred to life, by hate as much as by love...
Understandably, it contains many faults, due partly to immaturity, but more to the fact that my technical competence was not equal to my ambition, which in retrospect makes me realise how horizons narrow in middle age. In reissuing it in this very slightly abridged version, I am conscious that it...
The big-boned man in a heavy coat walked slowly and like a seaman. The child, muffled in an anorak, moved erratically, as if debating with himself whether to run, or skip, or make some sudden change of course. ‘How do, Killer,’ said Harry, pausing as they met under a lamp. ‘That is you, innit, in...
That idea of health was all but novel to him, he had sunk so deep, and it presented itself with an urgent attractiveness in the new year’s astonishing first white light. Through a window to his right the old unpruned apple tree which had gathered wreaths of snow in its mossy twigs was being shock...
There is nobody inside, he said. But I said: No, des’, it could not be like that. A house is strong, I said, and has its own time. You will see, I said; you will see how a house endures. Thinking of this house, and the far rooms, that voices go into and then you hear nothing, but still they are t...