For three very different people brought together by their love for birds, life on the Queensland coast in 1914 is the timeless and idyllic world of sandpipers, ibises and kingfishers. In another hemisphere civilization rushes headlong into a brutal conflict. Life there is lived from moment to moment. Inevitably, the two young men - sanctuary owner and employee - are drawn to the war, and into the mud and horror of the trenches of Armentieres. Alone on the beach, their friend Imogen, the middle-aged wildlife photographer, must acknowledge for all three of them that the past cannot be held.
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From the Inside Flap:
In this shimmering work of imagination, one of Australia's most honored writers conjures a single still moment on the edge of the 20th century in which two unlikely people share a friendship. When Ashley Crowther returns to Australia to manage his father's property, he discovers a timeless landscape of kingfishers and ibises; he also meets Jim Saddler, the young woodsman who becomes Ashley's guide to his inheritance. Together they discard the differences of personality and class to enter a partnership of wonder. But when war breaks out in Europe, Jim and Ashley are drawn into obscene enterprise of the trenches, where death falls from the sky and burrows out of the earth. In telling the story of these men, Fly Away Peter combines overwhelmingly sensual imagery with an unblinking consciousness of the worst that history can inflict to produce a novel of phosphorescent beauty.
About the Author:
David Malouf is the internationally acclaimed author of novels including The Great World (winner of the Commonwealth Writers' prize and the Prix Femina Etranger), Remembering Babylon (shortlisted for the Booker Prize and winner of the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award), An Imaginary Life, Conversations at Curlow Creek, Dream Stuff ('These stories are pearls' Spectator), Every Move You Make ('Rare and luminous talent' Guardian), his autobiographical classic 12 Edmondstone Street and Ransom. His Collected Stories won the 2008 Australia-Asia Literary Award. In 2008 Malouf was the Scottish Arts' Council Muriel Spark International Fellow. He was born in 1934 and was brought up in Brisbane.
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- PublisherChatto & Windus
- Publication date1982
- ISBN 10 0701126256
- ISBN 13 9780701126254
- BindingHardcover
- Edition number1
- Number of pages134
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