INLAND

First UK edition, first printing. Original black cloth lettered in white to the spine, in the dustwrapper illustrated by Russell Mills. A very near fine copy, the binding square and firm, the contents, except for some light toning, clean throughout. In the fine, unclipped dustwrapper (£10.99 net to the front flap). A lovely, sharp copy of the scarce Faber issue of Murnane's 'Inland', the first of the author's works to appear in the UK.

For decades, Gerald Murnane was a well-kept literary secret, published solely in his native Australia and with something like a hardcore following largely among fellow writers (Teju Cole refers to Murnane as "a genius, [...] a worthy heir to Beckett"). Following 'Tamarisk Row' (1974), 'A Lifetime on Clouds' (1976) and 'The Plains' (1982), 'Inland' (1988) was the first of his novels to appear in the UK. Published by Faber And Faber, the book, clearly issued in a tiny print run (it has always been harder to find than the Australian edition), perhaps predictably went under the radar, and no further books were issued until quite recently. It was an extended 2012 review-essay by J. M. Coetzee, marking the publication of a US paperback edition of 'Inland', that markedly raised Murnane's international profile. Coetzee notes that Murnane's fictions "lack many of the standard features of the novel: they have no plot worth speaking of, and only the most desultory narrative line; their personages have no names and few individuating characteristics." 'Inland' reads, at times, like nonfiction, but as Chris Power points out (The Guardian, 14 January 2024), "the narrator is not Murnane. We know this because he opens the book by saying: "I am writing in the library of a manor-house, in a village I prefer not to name, near the town of Kunmadaras, in Szolnok County." This places us in Hungary, and Murnane, we know – one of many eccentric trivialities that circle him – has never left Australia." There is, however, an underlying narrative, the 'author' remembering his childhood and "the girl from Bendigo Street", their friendship and parting, and what Coetzee describes "the man's later attempts, Orpheus-like, to summon her back, or if not her, then her shade, from the realm of the dead and the forgotten. [...] The emotional conviction behind the later parts of Inland is so intense, the somber lyricism so moving, the intelligence behind the chiseled sentences so undeniable, that we suspend all disbelief, forgive the boy his imagined sins, and allow the peasant girl from Hungary and the girl from Bendigo Street to shine their benign radiance on us from a world beyond that is somehow also this world." (J. M. Coetzee, 'The Quest for the Girl from Bendigo Street', The New York Review of Books, December 20, 2012)