The Mountain by Drusilla Modjeska

The Mountain by Drusilla Modjeska

A luminously written, rich tale of a country on the brink of independence, and split personal loyalties within postcolonial society

In 1968, Papua New Guinea is on the brink of independence, and everything is about to change. Amidst the turmoil ethnographic filmmaker Leonard arrives from England with his Dutch wife, Rika, to study and film an isolated village high in the mountains. The villagers' customs and art have been passed down through generations, and Rika is immediately struck by their paintings on a cloth made of bark. Rika and Leonard are also confronted with the new university in Moresby, where intellectual ambition and the idealism of youth are creating friction among locals such as Milton, a hot-headed young playwright, and visiting westerners, such as Martha, to whom Rika becomes close. But it is when Rika meets brothers Jacob and Aaron that all their lives are changed forever. Drusilla Modjeska's sweeping novel takes us deep into this fascinating, complex country, whose culture and people cannot escape the march of modernity that threatens to overwhelm them. Shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award, this is a riveting story of love, loss, grief, and betrayal.

Julian Randolph 'Mick' Stow was born in Geraldton, Western Australia, in 1935. While at university he sent his poems to a British publisher. The resulting collection, Act One, won the Australian Literature Society's Gold Medal in 1957--as did the prolific young writer's third novel, To the Islands, the following year. To the Islands also won the 1958 Miles Franklin Literary Award. Stow reworked the novel for a second edition almost twenty-five years later, but never allowed its two predecessors to be republished.

He worked briefly as an anthropologist's assistant in New Guinea--an experience that subsequently informed Visitants--then fell seriously ill and returned to Australia. In the 1960s he lectured at universities in Australia and England, and lived in America on a Harkness fellowship. He published his second collection of verse, Outrider; the novel Tourmaline, on which critical opinion was divided; and his most popular fiction, The Merry-Go-Round in the Sea and Midnite.

In 1969 he settled permanently in England: first in Suffolk, then in Essex, where he moved in 1981. He received the 1979 Patrick White Award.

Randolph Stow died in 2010. He has been hailed as 'the least visible figure of that great twentieth-century triumvirate of Australian novelists whose other members are Patrick White and Christina Stead'.

Drusilla Modjeska was born in London. She spent several years in Papua New Guinea before arriving in Australia in 1971, where she gained a doctorate at the university of NSW. Modjeska's writing often explores the boundaries between fiction and non-fiction. The best known of her work are Poppy (1990), a fictionalized biography of her mother, and Stravinsky's Lunch (2001).
She lives in Sydney.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781741666502
ISBN 10	1741666503
Title	The Mountain
Author	Drusilla Modjeska
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Random House Australia
Year published	2012-05-01
Number of pages	448
Prizes	Short-listed for Miles Franklin Literary Award 2013
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.