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

At dawn—what a word: the beginning of the world all over again—the two women set out from Sydney in a small car, as other people were slowly going about their tasks, or at least beginning to stir, producing a series of overlapping movements and stoppages, awakenings and false dawns, framed by the glass of the car.
   They were city women. Comfortably seated and warm they were hoping to experience the unexpected, an event or a person, preferably person, to enter and alter their lives. There is a certain optimism behind all travel. The passenger, who wore a chunky necklace like pebbles made out of beer bottles, had never been over the mountains before. And she was forty-three. Directions had been given in biro, on a page torn out of an exercise book. It would take all day getting there. Over the mountains, into the interior, in the backblocks of western New South Wales, which in the end is towards the sun.
   At an earlier time, perspiring travelers found no other way but to hack a path through the jungle or the dry bush. Very common image. Now on the long wide road called Parramatta, the obstacles consisted of nouns, adjectives and flags, and flashing lights in the shape of arrows, the many different interruptions of
color and promises, honestly, the hard work of selling jutting into the road itself, cluttering and distracting the mind. Traffic kept stopping, starting: you’d think by now they could synchronize the lights.