{"product_id":"2026100008973-secondhand-a-haunted-land","title":"A Haunted Land","description":"\u003cp\u003eEdition: First Edition\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eCondition remarks:\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBook: Good\u003cbr\u003eJacket: Worn\/faded, no tears\u003cbr\u003ePages: Tanning and foxing\u003cbr\u003eCondition remarks: DJ: good with minor wear along the edges, in mylar. Binding: remains intact. Boards: faded spine; square and clean. Pages: Yellowed with light foxing on the book block. Markings: small bookseller sticker on the fep. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eBeneath the vast, sun-scorched skies of the Western Australian outback, A Haunted Land announces the extraordinary debut of one of Australia's most gifted literary voices. Randolph Stow's 1956 novel chronicles the tormented Maguire family across generations, trapping them within the unyielding grip of their remote pastoral station — a landscape that is as much psychological prison as physical place. At the heart of the narrative is Andrew Maguire, a patriarch whose obsessions and sins cast long, dark shadows over his descendants, binding them to a cycle of passion, violence, and spiritual desolation that seems as inescapable as the red earth itself.\n\nStow writes with a remarkable maturity for a debut novelist — he was barely twenty when the book was published — wielding prose that is both lyrical and unsparing, suffused with a brooding Gothic intensity that places A Haunted Land firmly in the tradition of great colonial literature. The novel interrogates the psychological cost of wresting life from an indifferent and ancient continent, arguing that the land itself exacts a terrible toll on those who seek to possess it. Critics have long recognised this work as a precursor to Stow's later masterpieces, and its haunting power endures as a testament to the darkness that can lie beneath the Australian pastoral myth — leaving the reader to wonder whether any family can truly escape the ghosts they inherit.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Secondhand Stock","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":49313640448219,"sku":"2026100008973-SECONDHAND","price":450.0,"currency_code":"AUD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0523\/7646\/9701\/files\/95023586-316c-40a7-948f-f40828ff0e03.png?v=1789524770","url":"https:\/\/bookgrocer.com\/products\/2026100008973-secondhand-a-haunted-land","provider":"Book Grocer","version":"1.0","type":"link"}