Book description
Set in nineteenth-century Australia,
Voss
is the story of the secret passion between an explorer and a naïve
young woman. Although they have met only a few times, Voss and Laura are
joined by overwhelming, obsessive feelings for each other. Voss sets out
to cross the continent, and as hardships, mutiny and betrayal whittle
away his power to endure and to lead, his attachment to Laura gradually
increases. Laura, waiting in Sydney, moves through the months of
separation as if they were a dream and Voss the only reality.
Patrick White was born in England in 1912 and taken to Australia,
where his father owned a sheep farm, when he was six months old. He
was educated in England at Cheltenham college and King's College,
Cambridge. He settled in London, where he wrote several unpublished
novels, then served in the RAF during the war. He returned to
Australia after the war.
White became the most considerable figure in modern Australian
literature, awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1973. The great
poet of Australian landscape, he turned its vast empty spaces into
great mythic landscapes of the soul. His position as a man of letters
was controversial, provoked by his acerbic, unpredictable public
statements and his belief that it is eccentric individuals who offer
the only hope of salvation. He died in September 1990.
