The Great World is a remarkable novel of self-knowledge and of fall from innocence, of survival and witness. Absorbed by the twentieth-century history of Australian life, the novel focuses on the unlikely friendship of two men who meet as POWs of the Japanese during WWII: Digger Keen, and Vic Curran. For both men, war was supposed to be a testing ground of masculine and nationalist virtue. Instead, it becomes an ordeal that lays bare the painful reality which lies behind a nation's myth of itself.

"The rare serious novel that doesn't condescend to its characters, this book has a limpidity and an elliptical sense of time that save it from becoming a blockbuster-style epic--despite having some of that form's easy pleasures--and render it poetic."--The New Yorker

Author: David Malouf
Binding Type: Paperback
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 09/28/1993
Series: Vintage International
Pages: 340
Weight: 0.98lbs
Size: 8.58h x 5.54w x 0.85d
ISBN: 9780679748366


Review Citation(s):
Publishers Weekly 09/27/1993

About the Author
David Malouf is the author of ten novels and six volumes of poetry. His novel The Great World was awarded both the prestigious Commonwealth Prize and the Prix Femina Estranger. Remembering Babylon was short-listed for the Booker Prize. He lives in Sydney, Australia.