Harland's Half Acre
Condition: SECONDHAND
This is a secondhand book. The jacket image is a photograph of the exact copy we have in stock. This image shows the condition of this book. Further condition remarks are below.
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: Worn/faded, no tears
Pages: Yellowed
In the sun-drenched landscapes of twentieth-century Queensland, Harland's Half Acre chronicles the turbulent life of Frank Harland, a visionary Australian painter whose obsessive dedication to his art comes at an enormous personal cost. Told through the eyes of Phil Vernon, a young lawyer drawn into Frank's orbit, the novel presents a sweeping portrait of a man consumed by a singular, almost mythological dream — to reclaim the ancestral land lost by his impoverished family — while the world around him shifts and fractures across decades of Australian history. David Malouf, one of Australia's most celebrated prose stylists, constructs this narrative with a poet's precision and a novelist's command of time, memory, and place. The novel argues that the act of creation — whether of art or of self — is inseparable from loss, and that beauty is most often forged in deprivation. Malouf's lyrical, luminous prose transforms what might have been a conventional saga into something closer to myth, leaving the reader to wonder: what does a man truly possess when he has surrendered everything for a dream?
Author: David Malouf
Format: Hardback
Published: 1984, Chatto & Windus / The Hogarth Press
Genre: Australian history
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: Worn/faded, no tears
Pages: Yellowed
In the sun-drenched landscapes of twentieth-century Queensland, Harland's Half Acre chronicles the turbulent life of Frank Harland, a visionary Australian painter whose obsessive dedication to his art comes at an enormous personal cost. Told through the eyes of Phil Vernon, a young lawyer drawn into Frank's orbit, the novel presents a sweeping portrait of a man consumed by a singular, almost mythological dream — to reclaim the ancestral land lost by his impoverished family — while the world around him shifts and fractures across decades of Australian history. David Malouf, one of Australia's most celebrated prose stylists, constructs this narrative with a poet's precision and a novelist's command of time, memory, and place. The novel argues that the act of creation — whether of art or of self — is inseparable from loss, and that beauty is most often forged in deprivation. Malouf's lyrical, luminous prose transforms what might have been a conventional saga into something closer to myth, leaving the reader to wonder: what does a man truly possess when he has surrendered everything for a dream?