A Long and Winding Road: Xavier Herbert's Literary Journey by Sean Monahan

Book Description

Secondhand. Good condition. Wear to book corners and edges. Marks on foredges. Inscribed by author. Body text and binding are still very good.

Part literary criticism, part literary detective story, this is the first major study of the work of Xavier Herbert, one of the great Australian novelists of the 20th century.

It began as an attempt to answer two questions: Why did a novel as magnificent as Poor Fellow My Country receive such a lukewarm response from much of the critical establishment? And how did a man who sometimes wrote so badly ever learn to write such a novel?

In exploring these questions, Sean Monahan offers perceptive new readings of Herbert's major works, looking in each earlier work for clues to the mystery of where the final great achievement came from.

This engaging, accessible book makes a substantial and original contribution to understanding Herbert's fiction while also telling the human story of a writer's rocky road to creating a masterpiece.