Author(s): Christina Stead

Fiction

Set in Sydney in the twenties, this is a fascinating novel made timeless by its richness of imagination and depth of insight; by its exploration of the inner life and the brilliance of its evocative prose. The city itself is as vividly alive as the people who live at Woolloomooloo or 'Fisherman's Bay' and walk in the Domain or on the foreshores of the sparkling harbour. Catherine Baguenault and her illegitimate half-brother, Michael, suffer the peculiar torments and frustrations of the over-sensitive and over-imaginative; they are more wayward and perverse than Baruch Mendelssohn, the scholar, and Tom Withers, the schemer, who share their thoughts and their poverty; they cannot accept life simply like their cousin Joseph, nor dabble in socialism like their friends the Folliots. Possessed by their own demons, they are rebels who will never conform.