A new work by a master of contemporary Australian fiction, highly regarded overseas, but little-known here. Giramondo's publication of Border Districts, and the retrospective volume Collected Short Fiction (early next year) is a collaboration with the distinguished New York publisher Farrar Straus Giroux.
Conceived as Gerald Murnane's last work of fiction, Border Districts was written after the author moved from Melbourne to a small town on the western edge of the Wimmera plains, near the border with South Australia. The narrator of this fiction has made a similar move, from a capital city to a remote town in the border country, where he intends to spend the last years of his life. It is a time for exploring the enduring elements of his experience, as these exist in his mind, images whose persistence is assured, but whose significance needs to be rediscovered. As Murnane's narrator declares, 'the mind is a place best viewed from borderlands'. 'A genius on the level of Beckett' - Teju Cole 'The emotional conviction...is so intense, the somber lyricism so moving, the intelligence behind the chiseled sentences so undeniable, that we suspend all disbelief.' - J.M. Coetzee
