Author:Leslie Thomas
Written with the characteristic wit and good humour, Leslie Thomas's novel tells the story of a grown man who runs away from home, and the adventures that befall him in his quest for a new lease of life. His latest love affair discovered (thanks to an observant fifteen-year-old daughter who points out the still-wet suds of expensive soap lingering in his ear), bestselling author Nicholas Boulting sets off amid a torrent of abuse to see what else life can offer. After his fantasy escape to Luxor turns into a nighmarish excursion to Malaga, Nicholas returns hastily to London. He moves into a flat in Little Venice with Sol Solomon, a sex-mad writer of dubious reputation, and sits down to write his next novel, Owls of Desperation. Full of the qualities we have come to expect from his novels, Running Away is Leslie Thomas's eminently readable and enjoyable story of one man's mid-life crisis.
Beautiful and heroic...Every passage merits attention and gives satisfaction
—— New York Times Book ReviewOne of the greatest magicians of fiction ... White's scope is vast and his invention endless
—— ObserverPatrick White is, in the finest sense, a world novelist. His themes are catholic and complex and he pursues them with a single-minded energy and vision
—— GuardianThe outstanding figure in Australian fiction
—— New York TimesIn his major postwar novels, the pain and earnestness of the individual’s quest for ‘meaning and design’ can be felt more intensely than perhaps anywhere else in contemporary Western prose
—— Sunday TimesAn antipodean King Lear writ gentle and tragicomic, almost Chekhovian . . . an intensely dramatic masterpiece.
—— The Australian