Book description
Two children are brought to a wild garden on the shores of Sydney
Harbour to shelter from the Second World War. The boy's mother has
died in the Blitz. The girl is the daughter of a Sydney woman and a
Communist executed in a Greek prison. In wartime Australia, these two
children form an extraordinary bond as they negotiate the dangers of
life as strangers abandoned on the far side of the world.
With the tenderness and rigour of an old, wise novelist, Patrick
White explores the world of these children, the city of his childhood
and the experience of war. The Hanging Garden ends as the news
reaches Sydney of victory in Europe, and the children face their
inevitable separation.
White put the novel aside at this point and how he planned to finish
the work remains a mystery. But at his death he left behind a
masterpiece in the making, published here for the first time.
Patrick White was born in England in 1912. His Australian parents
took him home when he was six months old but educated him in England, at
Cheltenham College and King's College, Cambridge. He settled in London,
where his first novel,
Happy Valley
, was published to some acclaim in 1939. After serving in the RAF during
the Second World War he returned to Australia with his partner, Manoly
Lascaris. The novels, short stories and plays that followed
The Tree
of Man
in 1956 made White a considerable figure in world literature. He was
awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1973.
The Hanging Garden
was begun and put aside in 1981 when White was lured away to write once
again for the theatre. The unfinished novel was found among his papers
after his death in September 1990.
