The Burnt Ones
Contents ( 16)
About the Book
In this superlative collection of short stories, Patrick White explores the gulf – by turns funny and unbearably sad – between life’s expectations and its realities. With immense understanding and compassion, he captures the longings that underly the relationships of men and women, and the tender pathos of the heart’s secrets.
Patrick White
THE BURNT ONES
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Version 1.0
Epub ISBN 9781446435076
www.randomhouse.co.uk
Published by Vintage 1995
2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1
Copyright © Patrick White 1964
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
First published in Great Britain by Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1964
Vintage
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Random House UK Limited Reg. No. 954009
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 0 09 932411 3
Contents
Cover
About the Book
Title
Copyright
Dedication
About the Author
By Patrick White
Aknowledgements
Dead Roses
Willy-Wagtails by Moonlight
A Glass of Tea
Clay
The Evening at Sissy Kamara’s
A Cheery Soul
Being Kind to Titina
Miss Slattery and her Demon Lover
The Letters
The Woman who wasn’t Allowed to Keep Cats
Down at the Dump
For Nin and Geoffrey Dutton
THE BURNT ONES
Patrick White was born in England in 1912. He was taken to Australia (where his father owned a sheep farm) when he was six months old, but educated in England, at Cheltenham College and King’s College, Cambridge. He settled in London, where he wrote several unpublished novels, then served in the RAF during the war; he returned after the war to Australia.
He became the most considerable figure in modern Australian literature, awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1973. The great poet of Australian landscape, he has turned its vast empty spaces into great mythic landscapes of the soul. His position as man of letters was controversial, provoked by his acerbic, unpredictable public statements and his belief that it is eccentric individuals who offer the only hope of salvation. Technically brilliant, he is one modern novelist to whom the oft-abused epithet ‘visionary’ can safely be applied. He died in September 1990.