Books by Gerald Murnane

Border Districts, purportedly the Australian master Gerald Murnane's final work of fiction, is a hypnotic, precise, self-lacerating `report' on a life led as an avid reader, fumbling lover, `student of mental imagery', and devout believer in the luminescence of memory and of literature.

In the first days of spring in his eighty-second year, Gerald Murnane ‿ perhaps the greatest living writer of English prose ‿ began a project that would round off his strange career as a novelist. He would read all of his books in turn and prepare a report on each. His original intention was to lodge the reports in two of his legendary filing cabinets: in the Chronological Archive, which documents his life as a whole, and the Literary Archive, which is devoted to everything he has written. As the reports grew, however, they themselves took on the form of a book, a book as beguiling and hallucinatory, in its way, as the works on which they were meant to report. These miniature memoirs or stories lead the reader through the capacious territory Murnane refers to as his mind: they dwell on the circumstances that gave rise to his writing, on images and associations, on Murnane‿s own theories of fiction, and then memories of a deeply personal kind. The final essay is, of course, on Last Letter to a Reader itself: it considers the elation and exhilaration that accompany the act of writing, and offers a moving finale to what must surely be Murnane‿s last work, as death approaches.

Never before available to readers in the UK, these brilliant and idiosyncratic short stories stand alongside the fictions of Borges, Beckett and Nabokov.

A lonely child of unusual sensibility inherits his father's love of horse-racing and his mother's Catholicism in this evocative, semi-autobiographical novel.