Eucalyptus: A Novel - Couverture souple

"One of the great and most surprising courtships in literature" (Michael Ondaatje)

"Bail tells a story which is encrusted with delicious detail, and writes in an affecting mood of rapt tenderness. The book will haunt its readers long after more perfectly-finished fictions have faded from their memories" (Andrew Motion Observer)

"Tall trees inspire tall tales. Eucalyptus makes most other novels seem weedy by comparison. It is a towering achievement" (Mark Sanderson Time Out)

"His sentences have a perpetually off-balance wit which gives you life's jumble, its mystery, its unexplained compactness. You take in the humour first, but then they deepen and deepen. Buy the book. You won't have read anything like it" (Francis Spufford Evening Standard)

"A most unusual, enchanting work...a novel of most beguiling originality" (Carmen Callil Daily Telegraph)

Winner of the 1999 Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best Book

A New York Times Notable Book of 1998

"There is such delight in Eucalyptus, such a strange and sly and swerving humour -- You will never forget what is at the heart of this novel -- one of the great and most surprising courtships in literature."
--Michael Ondaatje

Amidst the spearing light and broken shadows of Australia's Outback, a man named Holland raises his daughter, Ellen. As she grows into a woman of unusual beauty, he tends an orchard that boasts every species of eucalyptus. When Ellen is nineteen, her father makes an announcement: she will marry the man who can successfully name each tree. What emerges is a story scintillating with sudden wisdom and spiky truths, a modern-day fairy tale that affirms the seductive power of storytelling itself.