The Hanging Garden

Patrick White

Random House Australia, 2013 - Fiction - 224 pages

A previously unpublished novel from the winner of the 1973 Nobel Prize for Literature.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.

About the author

Patrick White was born in England in 1912 and taken to Australia, where his father owned a sheep farm, when he was six months old. He was educated in England at Cheltenham college and King's College, Cambridge. He settled in London, where he wrote several unpublished novels, then served in the RAF during the war. He returned to Australia after the war. He became the most considerable figure in modern Australian literature, awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1973. The great poet of Australian landscape, he turned its vast empty spaces into great mythic landscapes of the soul. His position as a man of letters was controversial, provoked by his acerbic, unpredictable public statements and his belief that it is eccentric individuals who offer the only hope of salvation. He died in September 1990.

Bibliographic information

• Title: The Hanging Garden
• Author: Patrick White
• Edition: reprint
• Publisher: Random House Australia, 2013
• ISBN: 1742752667, 9781742752662
• Length: 224 pages
• Subjects: Fiction / City Life; Fiction / Classics; Fiction / Historical / 20th Century / World War II; Fiction / Historical / General; Fiction / Literary