Every Move You Make

by David Malouf
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A brilliant collection by a great international writer - Malouf's range is dazzling and his canvas is the vast Australian continent, with unsettling glimpses of a world beyond.

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Synopsis

Bookish boys and taciturn men, strong women and wayward sons, fathers and daughters, lovers and husbands, a composer and his muse, a builder-architect and his legacy – here are their stories, whole lives brought vividly into focus and so powerfully rooted in the landscape that you can almost feel the heat and the dust. His canvas is the vast Australian continent from the mysterious, glittering Valley of Lagoons behind the Great Divide in Far North Queensland, to bohemian Balmain and the Centre at Uluru, but always there are enticing glimpses of a world beyond, and the stories are tender, subtle, unsettlingly intimate.A young man going off to war tries to make sense of his place in the world he is leaving; a composer’s life plays itself out as a complex domestic cantata; an accident on a hunting trip speaks volumes, which its inarticulate victim never could; and, in the funniest, most surprising story of all, a down-to-earth woman stubbornly tries to keep her feet on the ground at Ayers Rock. Malouf’smen and women are together but curiously alone, looking for something they seem to have missed, or missed out on, in life, puzzling over the space they’ll leave behind when the waters close over them…This is a heartbreakingly beautiful, richly satisfying collection by a master storyteller, one of the great writers of our time.

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Dec 2

Book club.

by Susan Duncan on 2 December 2009

Book club. 0 comments

Tonight we meet for the last book club of 2009. Once a month for years now, we women from the Bays have gathered to talk books, food, art and of course, life as we live it on the boat-access-only shores of Pittwater. To me, winter is the best time. Darkness closes in early, we putt-putt slowly around the honeycomb shoreline, the cold nipping our cheeks. Guided only by moonlight. And a final welcoming...

Editorial Reviews

"Malouf, always so precise in his characterisation, so poetic in his evocations of nature and so haunting in his insight into loneliness and frustrated love, is a writer to treasure" - Francis Quinn, Literary Review

"Graceful and unsettling... Malouf's prose is invariably elegant" - David Flusfeder, Financial Times

"A master of the incisive, seamless, turns-on-a-sixpence short story...this collection is a jewel" - Kate Saunders, The Times

"Rare and luminous talent...an outstanding collection" - Jem Poster, Guardian

"At times unsettling in the intensity of their vision, Malouf's stories provide a deeply intelligent meditation on the unknowability of the self" - Anna Scott, Observer

"Colours and landscapes are evoked in language that, at once lush and direct, is in itself a pleasure and a reminder that Malouf is also a poet of considerable talent" - Aamer Hussein, Independent

"Contemporary Australia lives and breathes, shudders, groans and even scratches without a trace of inhibition throughout these seven vivid narratives from one of the finest of contemporary writers" - Irish Times

"His writing here has a fine descriptive delicacy and sensory exactness that act as guarantees of the stories' truth and the authenticity of the experiences they embody" - Tom Deveson, Sunday Times

"Tender and luminous tales...It is his rich landscapes for which Malouf is most often praised and this collection contains some of the most evocative descriptions of the Australian continent" - Chitra Ramaswamy, Scotland on Sunday

"Malouf deals with both the vast and the seemingly unimportant... He does it with biting wit, elegance and a rare, uncluttered honesty" - Chris Dolan, Saturday Herald

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