A Season on Earth

Lost to the world for more than four decades, A Season on Earth is the essential link between two acknowledged masterpieces by Gerald Murnane: his debut novel, Tamarisk Row, a lyrical account of boyhood, and the revolutionary prose of The Plains.

A hilarious tale of a lustful teenager in 1950s Melbourne, A Lifetime on Clouds has been considered an outlier in Murnane’s fiction. That is because, as Murnane writes in his foreword, it is ‘only half a book and Adrian Sherd only half a character’. Here, at last, is young Adrian’s journey in full, from fantasies about orgies with American film stars and idealized visions of suburban marital bliss to his struggles as a Catholic student-priest, and finally a burgeoning sense of the boundless imaginative possibilities to be found in literature and landscape.

Gerald Murnane was born in Melbourne in 1939. He has been a primary teacher, an editor and a university lecturer. His debut novel, Tamarisk Row (1974), was followed by eleven other works of fiction, including The Plains, A Million Windows and, most recently, Border Districts [shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award]. In 1999 Murnane won the Patrick White Award and in 2009 he won the Melbourne Prize for Literature. He lives in western Victoria.