Border Districts

Winner of the 2018 Prime Minister's Literary Award for Fiction

A new work by a master of contemporaryAustralian fiction, highly regarded overseas, but little-known here.Giramondo's publication of BorderDistricts, and the retrospective volume CollectedShort Fiction (early next year) is a collaboration with the distinguishedNew York publisher Farrar Straus Giroux.

Conceived as GeraldMurnane's last work of fiction, BorderDistricts was written after the author moved from Melbourne to a small townon the western edge of the Wimmera plains, near the border with SouthAustralia. The narrator of this fiction has made a similar move, from a capitalcity to a remote town in the border country, where he intends to spend the lastyears of his life. It is a time for exploring the enduring elements of hisexperience, as these exist in his mind, images whose persistence is assured,but whose significance needs to be rediscovered. Readers of Murnane's earlierwork will recognise some of these images: the dark-haired young woman at awindow; the ancestral house set in grasslands; coloured glass, marbles,goldfish, the outfits of jockeys. Murnane's images often draw their power fromthe light that falls upon them from a distant or mysterious source. But he alsoconsiders the possibility that the mind casts its own light, imbuing the imagesin the observer's mind with the colours of his soul.

As Murnane'snarrator declares, 'the mind is a place best viewed from borderlands'. In thiswork, Border Districts also refers tothe border country between life and death; and there is another meaning, in thenarrator's discovery of others who might share his world, even though theyenter it from a different direction, across the border districts which separate,or unite, two human beings.

GeraldMurnane is the author of eleven books of fiction, including Tamarisk Row, Inland,Barley Patch, A History of Books and A Million Windows,and a collection of essays, Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs, which havebeen published by Giramondo. He is a recipient of the Patrick White LiteraryAward, the Melbourne Prize for Literature, the Adelaide Festival LiteratureAward for Innovation and the Victorian Premier's Literary Award.

'A genius on the level of Beckett' - Teju Cole

'The emotional conviction...is so intense, the somberlyricism so moving, the intelligence behind the chiseled sentences soundeniable, that we suspend all disbelief.' - J.M. Coetzee

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