The Acolyte
Title | The Acolyte PDF eBook |
Author | Thea Astley |
Publisher | St. Lucia : University of Queensland Press |
Pages | 176 |
Release | 1980 |
Genre | Fiction |
ISBN |
Thea Astley won the coveted Miles Franklin Award for the third time with this powerful, bitterly funny novel, her favourite among her own works. Many lives orbit around the radiant genius of Jack Holberg - including wife, lover, child and acolyte - all slowly destroyed by their devotion to the blind musician.
Drylands
Title | Drylands PDF eBook |
Author | Thea Astley |
Publisher | Text Publishing |
Pages | 259 |
Release | 2018-04-30 |
Genre | Fiction |
ISBN | 192562661X |
This will be a book for the world’s last reader, she decided, chewing pen-end over an open exercise book. In the dying town of Drylands, Janet Deakin sells papers to lonely locals. At night, in her flat above the newsagency, she attempts to write a novel for a world in which no one reads—‘full of people, she envisaged, glaring at a screen that glared glassily back.’ Drylands is the story of the townsfolk’s harsh, violent lives. Trenchant and brilliant, Thea Astley’s final novel is a dark portrait of outback Australia in decline. Thea Astley was born in Brisbane in 1925. Her first novel, Girl with a Monkey, was published in 1958 and her third, The Well Dressed Explorer (1962), won the Miles Franklin Literary Award. Many notable books followed, among them the groundbreaking A Kindness Cup (1974), which addressed frontier massacres of Indigenous Australians, and It’s Raining in Mango (1987). Her last novel was Drylands (1999), her fourth Miles Franklin winner. Her fiction is distinguished by vivid imagery and metaphor; a complex, ironic style; and a desire to highlight oppression and social injustice. One of the most distinctive and influential Australian novelists of the twentieth century, Astley died in 2004. ‘It is impossible to put this book down. It seethes with energy and passion.’ Herald Sun 'Wonderful.' Australian
The Fiction of Thea Astley
Title | The Fiction of Thea Astley PDF eBook |
Author | Susan Sheridan |
Publisher | |
Pages | 186 |
Release | 2016-05-09 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 9781604979329 |
Thea Astley is one of the outstanding Australian fiction writers of the twentieth century. Four of her novels, including her last, Drylands (1999), won the prestigious Miles Franklin prize, and she was awarded numerous literary and civic honors during her lifetime. Always a writer who avoided solemnity and undercut her characters' claims to heroism of any kind, she reveled in the new-found capacity to mock male pretension and assert female rebellion. Perhaps because of this, her late masterpieces have not yet had the proper recognition that is due to them. This book examines Astley's works and reinforces her standing as a major novelist. The main organizing principle in this study of Astley's fiction is her representation of place and power relations, and the innovative work of historicizing place. Continuing threads from chapter to chapter include the modes of irony, humor, and satire; her varying use of point of view; and her characteristic compression of language and narrative. Descriptive accounts of the novels are offered to raise broader issues of interpretation. Over the period 1986 to 1999 she produced six major works which amply demonstrate her capacity to bring together a critical exploration of patriarchal power relations and a postcolonial perspective on race relations. Also important in her later stories is her satire on the worship of unbridled 'development' which dominated Australian economic and social life in this period, especially in Queensland. The currency of such political and moral issues frames her work, yet her lively engagement with them was never merely topical, but grew out of that acute yet compassionate consciousness of human weakness, formed by her Catholic upbringing, and the darkly comic sensibility draws all these elements into relationship in Astley's art. This book, which is in the Cambria Australian Literature Series (general editor: Susan Lever; see http: //www.cambriapress.com/Austlit-series) will encourage readers familiar with Astley's work to revisit it and reconsider her lifelong achievement, and it will also lead a whole new generation of readers to enter her imaginative world, to be moved and informed by it.
It's Raining in Mango
Title | It's Raining in Mango PDF eBook |
Author | Thea Astley |
Publisher | Penguin Group Australia |
Pages | 240 |
Release | 1989-03-01 |
Genre | Fiction |
ISBN | 1742531482 |
One family traced from the 1860s to the 1980s, beginning with Cornelius Laffey, an Irish-born journalist. Wresting his kin from the easy living of nineteenth-century Sydney, he takes them to northern Queensland where thousands of hopefuls are digging for gold in the mud. The family confronts the horror of Aboriginal dispossession, and Cornelius is sacked for reporting the slaughter. The cycles of generations turn, one over the other. Only some things change. That world and this world both have their Catholic priests, their bigots, their radicals. Winner of the inaugural Steele Rudd Award, this is an unforgettable tale of the other side of Australia's heritage.
Reaching Tin River
Title | Reaching Tin River PDF eBook |
Author | Thea Astley |
Publisher | Text Publishing |
Pages | 260 |
Release | 2018-04-30 |
Genre | Fiction |
ISBN | 1925603555 |
• This May, Text will concurrently publish four Text Classics by the prolific and highly awarded Thea Astley • As with previous suites of Text Classics by Randolph Stow, Christina Stead, Amy Witting and Robin Klein, the concurrent publication of these four Astley novels demonstrates Text’s belief in the importance of this author • Astley is among the most significant Australian woman writers of the twentieth century—typified by her ironic style and her social consciousness, particularly of the injustices faced by indigenous Australians • At the time of her death in 2004, she held the record for the most Miles Franklin Literary Award wins by one author, a record she now jointly holds with Tim Winton • Collectively these four works of fiction are an opportunity for readers to rediscover parts of Astley’s catalogue that have been unjustly out-of-print, guided by two established and two emerging contemporary Australian woman authors • Reaching Tin River won the Christina Stead Prize for Fiction when first published in 1990 • A woman becomes obsessed with the story of a long-dead colonial pioneer, and her research becomes a way of coming to terms with her own past • This Text Classics edition will be introduced by Sydney Morning Herald 2017 Young Novelist of the Year and author of Our Magic Hour and Pulse Points, Jennifer Down
Vanishing Points
Title | Vanishing Points PDF eBook |
Author | Thea Astley |
Publisher | |
Pages | 234 |
Release | 1992 |
Genre | Australia |
ISBN | 9780855614782 |
Comprised of two interlinked novellas - 'The Genteel Poverty Bus Company' and 'Inventing the weather'.
An Item from the Late News
Title | An Item from the Late News PDF eBook |
Author | Thea Astley |
Publisher | Penguin Group |
Pages | 216 |
Release | 1984 |
Genre | Fiction |
ISBN |
Wafer, who saw his father blown apart by a bomb in the second world war, and who grew up under the shadow of the nuclear bomb, seeks to spend his middle years in a place of solitude where he can prepare for the inevitable... Allbut, scarcely a dot on the map in the vast Queensland outback, seems to be the perfect place. But Wafer's peace-loving ways are not understood by the clean and decent locals and when it comes, the final blast is not the one he expected.