Kangaroo (Text Classics)

After the Great War, Richard Lovat Somers, a writer, and Harriet, his wife, leave disillusioned Europe for Australia. There Somers falls into the company of charismatic fascist ‘Kangaroo’. The young writer struggles with his past and his personal ideology as he finds himself in a deadly tug-of-war between the mesmerising Kangaroo and the feisty communist Willies Struthers. With its astonishing descriptions of the bush ‘biding its time with a terrible ageless watchfulness’, and its free-form narrative, Kangaroo captivates and provokes.

D. H. Lawrence, born in England in 1885, is one of the key figures in literary modernism. Among his most notable novels are Sons and Lovers (1913), Women in Love (1920) and Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928). Kangaroo (1923) was published the year after Lawrence and his wife, Frieda, spent three months in Australia. Lawrence died in France in 1930.