The Voyage

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The Voyage is a masterly novel by a great writer at the peak of his powers.Frank Delage, piano manufacturer from Sydney, travels to Vienna, a city immersed in music, to present the Delage concert grand. He hopes to impress with its technical precision, its improvement on the old pianos of Europe.How could he not know his piano is all wrong for Vienna? Perhaps he should have tried Berlin.But a chance meeting with Amalia von Schalla brings new possibilities for Delage - connections, her daughter Elisabeth, and an avant garde composer. Now travelling home, on a container ship, with Elisabeth, the real story is about to begin.Murray Bail was born in Adelaide in 1941. He has won numerous awards, including the Commonwealth Writers Prize and the Miles Franklin Literary Award for Eucalyptus. His most recent novel, The Pages, was published in 2008 to great acclaim.'There's a lightness to Bail's writing - a gentle stealth in its revelations - that slowly but surely brings the reader alive...One of Australia's most original and imaginative writers.' Canberra Times'The Voyage is oblique, idiosyncratic and original. To read it is to breathe the rarefied air of an artistic consciousness, nostalgic for literary modernism. Bail deploys the structural integrity of the journey, such as the single day in Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway and James Joyce's Ulysses, to allow the disordered encroachment of the past on the present, and to permit a slippery, subjective treatment of time. This is a novel that demands your full attention, discoursing in an unbuttoned, Joycean fashion, approaching a sort of textual jouissance.' Weekend Australian'[The Voyage] is a lustrous piece of fiction, consistently surprising and illuminating, full of mirrors and illusions, but with the abiding face of real feeling and deep truth. We won't see a finer piece of fiction in the longest while.' Age'A fine achievement.' Australian Book Review'Here sits yet another elegant and most engaging piece of work from the ordered imagination of Murray Bail...a graceful and unfenced read.' Courier Mail/Daily Telegraph'Murray Bail's masterful novel is essentially a piece of music; and like all good music, although we know the plot from the start, it never fails to surprise us...Brilliant.' West Australian'This is an astonishing, defiant little book. Though concise in scale, it is vastly thought-provoking...If ever a novel could be said to exceed the sum of its many sensations, this masterful concoction engages, excites and perturbs with singular virtuosity.' Irish Times'A new novel release from Murray Bail is always worthy of rejoice. Few writers anywhere in the world can match the esteemed Australian for stylistic daring.' Irish Examiner'[an] astonishingly brilliant, defiant and utterly singular novel of intelligence, narrative shifts and frustrated desire, which makes more than a few nods to Voltaire’s Candide.' Eileen Battersby's book of the year, Irish Times