AustLit

'Every city, town and village has its memorial to war. Nowhere are these more eloquent than in Australia, generations of whose young men have enlisted to fight other people's battles - from Gallipoli and the Somme to Malaya and Vietnam. In THE GREAT WORLD, his finest novel yet, David Malouf gives a voice to that experience. But THE GREAT WORLD is more than a novel of war. Ranging over seventy years of Australian life, from Sydney's teeming King's Cross to the tranquil backwaters of the Hawkesbury River, it is a remarkable novel of self-knowledge and lost innocence, of survival and witness.'

Source: Publisher's blurb (Vintage reprint).

'On a fateful day in Hills End, a timber-milling town in the mountains of Victoria, seven children and their teacher set off to explore caves in the nearby mountains said to contain ancient Aboriginal rock art. While they are deep inside the mountain caves a storm of tremendous violence all but sweeps the town away and threatens to leave them stranded on the mountain.

'Tackling flooded creeks and washed out paths and fallen trees, the children make their way back to Hills End injured and exhausted, only to face a new battle to survive in the denuded town. ' (Publication summary)