To the islands: A novel - Hardcover

Stow, Randolph

3.89

289 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 080087739X ISBN 13: 9780800877392

Publisher: Taplinger Pub. Co, 1982

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A novel which won the 1958 Miles Franklin and Melbourne Book Fair Awards. It is the story of an old missionary whose faith has deserted him and who, after a crisis at the mission, sets out on a journey of self-discovery through landscape as desolate as the state of his soul.

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About the Author:

Julian Randolph ‘Mick’ Stow was born in Geraldton, Western Australia, in 1935. While at university he sent his poems to a British publisher. The resulting collection, Act One, won the Australian Literature Society’s Gold Medal in 1957—as did the prolific young writer’s third novel, To the Islands, the following year. To the Islands also won the 1958 Miles Franklin Literary Award. Stow reworked the novel for a second edition almost twenty-five years later, but never allowed its two predecessors to be republished.

He worked briefly as an anthropologist’s assistant in New Guinea—an experience that subsequently informed Visitants—then fell seriously ill and returned to Australia. In the 1960s he lectured at universities in Australia and England, and lived in America on a Harkness fellowship. He published his second collection of verse, Outrider; the novel Tourmaline, on which critical opinion was divided; and his most popular fiction, The Merry-Go-Round in the Sea and Midnite.

In 1969 he settled permanently in England: first in Suffolk, then in Essex, where he moved in 1981. He received the 1979 Patrick White Award.

Randolph Stow died in 2010. He has been hailed as ‘the least visible figure of that great twentieth-century triumvirate of Australian novelists whose other members are Patrick White and Christina Stead’.

Review:

'The most talented and celebrated Australian author of the post-[Patrick] White generation.' The Monthly

'The most talented and celebrated Australian author of the post-[Patrick] White generation.'―The Monthly

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