The Hanging Garden
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3.3 • 9 Ratings
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
A previously unpublished novel from the Australian winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature
Two children are brought to a wild garden on the shores of Sydney Harbour to shelter from the Second World War. The boy's mother has died in the Blitz. The girl is the daughter of a Sydney woman and a Communist executed in a Greek prison. In wartime Australia, these two children form an extraordinary bond as they negotiate the dangers of life as strangers abandoned on the far side of the world.
With the tenderness and rigour of an old, wise novelist, Patrick White explores the world of these children, the city of his childhood and the experience of war. The Hanging Garden ends as the news reaches Sydney of victory in Europe, and the children face their inevitable separation.
White put the novel aside at this point and how he planned to finish the work remains a mystery. But at his death in 1990 he left behind a masterpiece in the making.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This final, unfinished novel by Nobel laureate White (The Eye of the Storm) cements the late author's reputation as an incisive and compassionate voice of the 20th century. An elegiac portrait of two adolescents displaced during WWII, the novel guides the reader through multiple points of view, including Eirene Sklavos, brought to Australia after her father's death in a Greek prison, and Gilbert Horsfall, who witnessed the death of his friend in the Blitz and attempts to integrate into an unwelcoming community. White's prose is masterful, describing in surprising and ebullient turns of phrase everything from the book's eponymous garden to "thick-lensed spectacles might be helping him not to see the faces he is addressing." The novel was transcribed from White's original handwritten manuscript and left unedited, retaining his notes ("Find out about these mangroves") and the occasional false line. However, the roughness and the notes make a separation of author and text impossible, and reveal White to be as sympathetic and fascinating as Eirene and Gilbert. What White has left is a complete, complex, and beautiful portrait, an important addition to classic contemporary fiction.
