Fly Away Peter
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.
Edition: 1st uk ed.,
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: Worn/faded, no tears
Pages: Good
Condition remarks: price clipped dj.
In the tranquil marshlands of coastal Queensland, a young man named Jim Saddler discovers his calling as a bird-watcher, cataloguing the migratory wonders that pass through a sanctuary owned by the wealthy Ashley Crowther — but the idyll is shattered when the drums of the First World War draw Jim across the world to the mud and carnage of the Western Front. Fly Away Peter is a luminous novella that chronicles the violent collision between innocence and industrialised slaughter, using the delicate metaphor of bird migration to chart one man's journey from paradise into the abyss of Flanders. David Malouf constructs his narrative with a poet's precision, layering images of flight and freedom against the mechanical brutality of trench warfare, creating a meditation on time, mortality, and what it means to be truly alive. Widely regarded as one of the masterworks of Australian literature, Fly Away Peter illustrates Malouf's extraordinary gift for rendering the interior lives of ordinary people caught in the machinery of history. His prose — spare yet radiantly evocative — draws on the great modernist tradition while remaining utterly singular in its sensitivity to the natural world. The novel raises haunting questions about memory and continuity: if a man dies young, unremembered, does the beauty he once witnessed still endure? That unanswered question lingers long after the final page.
Author: David Malouf
Format: Hardback
Published: 1982, Chatto & Windus
Genre: Modern fiction
Edition: 1st uk ed.,
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: Worn/faded, no tears
Pages: Good
Condition remarks: price clipped dj.
In the tranquil marshlands of coastal Queensland, a young man named Jim Saddler discovers his calling as a bird-watcher, cataloguing the migratory wonders that pass through a sanctuary owned by the wealthy Ashley Crowther — but the idyll is shattered when the drums of the First World War draw Jim across the world to the mud and carnage of the Western Front. Fly Away Peter is a luminous novella that chronicles the violent collision between innocence and industrialised slaughter, using the delicate metaphor of bird migration to chart one man's journey from paradise into the abyss of Flanders. David Malouf constructs his narrative with a poet's precision, layering images of flight and freedom against the mechanical brutality of trench warfare, creating a meditation on time, mortality, and what it means to be truly alive. Widely regarded as one of the masterworks of Australian literature, Fly Away Peter illustrates Malouf's extraordinary gift for rendering the interior lives of ordinary people caught in the machinery of history. His prose — spare yet radiantly evocative — draws on the great modernist tradition while remaining utterly singular in its sensitivity to the natural world. The novel raises haunting questions about memory and continuity: if a man dies young, unremembered, does the beauty he once witnessed still endure? That unanswered question lingers long after the final page.