Happy valley
By: Patrick White ; introduction by Peter Craven
Publisher: Jonathan Cape
Published: 2012
Place of publication: London
Language: eng
Number of pages: 407
ISBN-13: 9780224097888
Subjects: City and town life; Fiction
Description: Happy Valley is set in a small country town in the Snowy Mountains. Based on Patrick White's own experiences in the early 1930s as a jackaroo at Bolaro, near Adaminaby in south-eastern 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. White was twenty-seven when Happy Valley was published by George C. Harrop in London. This mesmerising first novel gives us a prolonged glimpse of literary genius in the making. It won the Australian Literature Society Gold Medal in 1941, but White did not allow the novel to be republished in English in his lifetime. Happy Valley is the missing piece in the extraordinary jigsaw of White's work.
Notes: Originally published: 1939.