Tamarisk Row

Author: Gerald Murnane

Publisher: And Other Stories (2019)

Clement Killeaton transforms his father’s gambling, his mother’s piety, his fellow pupils’ cruelty and the mysterious but forbidden attractions of sex into an imagined world centred on horse-racing and played out in the dusty backyard of his home, across the landscapes of the district, and the continent of Australia. An unsparing evocation of a Catholic childhood in a country town in the late 1940s, Tamarisk Row’s lyrical prose is charged with the yearning, boredom, fear and fascination of boyhood.