Happy Valley (Text Classics)

Patrick White's magnificent debut novel, available for the first time since 1939.Based on Patrick White's own experiences in the early 1930s as a jackaroo at Bolaro in southeastern New South Wales, Happy Valley paints a portrait of a community in a desolate landscape. It is a jagged and restless study of small-town and country life.This mesmerizing first novel is the missing piece in the extraordinary jigsaw of White's work.White did not allow the novel to be republished in English in his lifetime. Its appearance now in the Text Classics series is a major literary event.Patrick White was the first Australian to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1973 and is considered one of the foremost novelists of the twentieth century. Following his debut, Happy Valley, White went on to publish twelve novels, including The Aunt’s Story, Voss, The Eye of the Storm, and The Twyborn Affair. He died in 1990, aged seventy-eight.