Author:Audrey Howard
Liverpool, 1921. It was the year lively Kate Fowler rebelled against working in her hated father's chip shop and, with her gentle sister Jenny, left his brutal house forever. For this was the Jazz Age - and Kate and Jenny revelled in their freedom and in dancing until dawn, until romance changed the tempo of their lives.
For Kate, it was Charlie, a man as strong and warm-hearted as herself. For Jenny, it was Nils, the Norwegian navigator, who shared a brief, bittersweet affair with her before tragically disappearing from her life. And while Kate and Charlie together face the bad times that are coming, Jenny looks set to repeat the tragic pattern of her mother's life.
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