It is also not a safe time to be ‘a wife with a lavender husband’. After pursuing the Bloomsbury life for many years, Edith finds herself fearful of being exposed. She also yearns for a family, and when she meets Richard again, the man who had audaciously laid his hand on her leg at a dinner party hosted by Prime Minister Menzies, it seems he could offer her not only security but a family.
Intelligent, poignant and absorbing, the final instalment in the Edith trilogy confirms Frank Moorhouse as one of Australia’s greatest writers.
Frank Moorhouse was born in the coastal town of Nowra, NSW. He worked as an editor of small-town newspapers and as an administrator, and became a full-time writer in the 1970s. He has written fiction, non-fiction, screenplays and essays, and edited many collections of writing.
Forty-Seventeen was given a laudatory full-page review by Angela Carter in The New York Times and was named Book of the Year by The Age and ‘moral winner’ of the Booker Prize by the London magazine Blitz. Grand Days, the first novel in The Edith Trilogy, won the SA Premier’s Award for Fiction. Dark Palace won the 2001 Miles Franklin Literary Award and was shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s Literary Award, the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award and the Age Book of the Year Award.
Moorhouse has undertaken numerous fellowships and his work has been translated into several languages. He was made a member of the Order of Australia for services to literature in 1985 and was awarded an honorary doctorate from Griffith University in 1997.
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
FICTION
Futility and Other Animals
The Americans, Baby
The Electrical Experience
Tales of Mystery and Romance
Conference-ville
The Everlasting Secret Family and Other Secrets
Forty-Seventeen
Grand Days
Cold Light
OTHER BOOKS
Lateshows
Loose Living
NON-FICTION
Days of Wine and Rage
Martini: A Memoir
COLLECTED WORKS
Selected Stories (also published as The Coca-Cola Kid)
FILM AND TELEVISION SCRIPTS
Between Wars (feature film)
Coca-Cola Kid (feature film)
Everlasting Secret Family (feature film)
Conference-ville (telemovie)
Time’s Raging (with Sophia Turkiewicz, telemovie)
The Disappearance of Azaria Chamberlain (docudrama)
*denotes actual person
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Dark Palace
9781742752716
Published by Random House Australia 2011
Copyright © Frank Moorhouse
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
A Vintage book
Published by Random House Australia Pty Ltd
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Addresses for companies within the Random House Group can be found at
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First published by Random House Australia in 2000
First published by Vintage in 2001
National Library of Australia
Cataloguing-in-Publication Entry
Moorhouse, Frank, 1938-
ISBN 978 1 74275 270 9 (pbk)
League of Nations - History - Fiction.
Man - woman relationships - Fiction.
Women diplomats - Fiction.
Geneva (Switzerland) - Fiction.
Australia - Fiction.
A823.3
Cover design by Gayna Murphy
Cover photography: image of woman in a grey wool suit
© Condé Nast Archive / Corbis; background image
© Cindy Yamanaka / ZUMA Press / Corbis.
This book was assisted by the Commonwealth Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory board. The book was completed through the generosity of King’s College, Cambridge, where the author was writer-in-residence in 1999.