num_pages: 340
description: The Great World is a remarkable novel of self-knowledge and of fall from innocence, of survival and witness. Absorbed by the twentieth-century history of Australian life, the novel focuses on the unlikely friendship of two men who meet as POWs of the Japanese during Digger Keen, and Vic Curran. For both men, war was supposed to be a testing ground of masculine and nationalist virtue. Instead, it becomes an ordeal that lays bare the painful reality which lies behind a nation's myth of itself. “The rare serious novel that doesn't condescend to its characters, this book has a limpidity and an elliptical sense of time that save it from becoming a blockbuster-style epic—despite having some of that form's easy pleasures—and render it poetic.”— The New Yorker
language: English
title: The Great World: A novel
titlecomplete: The Great World: A novel (Vintage International)
genres: Contemporary, War, Historical Fiction, Literary Fiction, Australia, World War II, Historical, Novels, Fiction, Literature
ratings_count: 745
places: Australia
awards: awardedAt: 662716800000
name: Prix Femina
category: Étranger, awardedAt: 662716800000
name: Miles Franklin Literary Award, awardedAt: 662716800000
name: Commonwealth Writers' Prize
category: Best Book
publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group