Winner

To the Islands Randolph Stow

Dustjacket synopsis:
"To the Islands, set in the far North West of Western Australia, is no simple clash between the old and the new. Instead, Stow has chosen for his hero an old man, Stephen Heriot, who for many years has run a mission station for aboriginals. He has reached a crisis in his life where the simplicity of his ideals has exploded into chaos and love has been twisted into hate. His journey towards self-discovery and the islands of the dead, accompanied by the faithful aboriginal Justin, brings Heriot through suffering to a greatness he had always been capable of but had never reached. Stow depicts both characters and background with equal brilliance and understanding."

Quotes:
"One of the rare novels that immediately establishes itself as having an original life of its own..." - Maurice Richardson, New Statesman
"He is in fact a real novelist...It is of course absurd to attempt to deal with a work of this quality in a few words" - John Davenport, The Observer

First Paragraph:

A child dragged a stick along the corrugated-iron wall of a hut, and Heriot woke and found the morning standing at his bed like a valet, holding out his daylight self to be put on again, his name, his age, his vague and wearying occupation. His eyes, not yet broken to the light, rested on the mud-brick wall beside his bed, drifted slowly upwards to the grass-thatched roof. From a rafter an organ-grinder lizard peered sidelong over its pulsing throat.

From the Pan paperback edition, 1962.

This page and its contents are copyright © 2006 by Perry Middlemiss, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia.

Last modified: March 6, 2006.