The Pages - Couverture souple

'Compelling... The spell is most powerfully cast in the brilliant quiet skill of the writing' Guardian

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.

Murray Bail's first novel since Eucalyptus is a beguiling meditation on friendship and love, on men and women, on landscape and the difficulties of thought itself.

'The novel's pleasures... mostly reside in its formal arrangement and Bail's brilliantly distilled, and witty prose' Times Literary Supplement

'A nicely written, wonderfully entertaining novel' The Daily Telegraph

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 - Independent

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 - Independent

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 - Literary Review

“A surfeit of imagination, skill and style...composed of stories within stories, of enigmatic characters and sly questions with many possible answers . . . It might also be said of Murray Bail’s novels [that] there are not enough of them.”—The New York Times Book Review

“Urban versus rural. The active versus the contemplative life. The Old World versus the antipodean New. Numerous such dichotomies are examined in this handsomely written novel by the Australian author Murray Bail...The Pages presents a mature exploration of matters of the heart as well as the mind.”—The Boston Globe
 
“Subtle, playful, cerebral, and strange. . . [an] offbeat blend of human comedy, maverick prose, and quirky observation . . . There's a marked visionary streak to his work. ”—The Seattle Times

“...Bail crafts a strange and impressionistic philosophical fable. Throughout, he strikes a brilliant thematic balance between theory and experience with sharp prose and dazzling imagery.”—Library Journal

“Bail plunges headlong into an intense examination of the relationships between language, experience, identity, and reality.” —The Times UK
 
“An intriguing novel of contraries...The tone of Bail’s oblique, demanding, intelligent, sardonic work reminds me of J. M. Coetzee’s cryptic narratives.” —The Guardian   
 
“Murray Bail makes philosophy, the love of wisdom, seem worth cultivating...[A] wonderfully entertaining novel.” —Daily Telegraph
 
“Brilliantly distilled, and witty.” —Times Literary Supplement
 
“Quietly fascinating” —The Independent
 
“This is a staggeringly rich book, full of warmth and sadness and the absolute tang of the real... It’s a wonderful book.” —The Age