In this remarkable self-portrait, Patrick White explains how on the very rare occasions when he re-reads a passage from one of his books, he recognises very little of the self he knows. This 'unknown' is the man interviewers and visiting students expect to find, but 'unable to produce him', he prefers to remain private, or as private as anyone who has been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature can ever be. In this book, it is the self Patrick White does recognise, the one he sees reflected in the glass.

Stan Parker, with only a horse and a dog for company journeys to a remote patch of land he has inherited in the Australian hills. Once the land is cleared and a rudimentary house built, he brings his wife Amy to the wilderness. Together they face lives of joy and sorrow as they struggle against the environment.

Elizabeth Hunter, an ex-socialite in her eighties, has a mystical experience during a summer storm in Sydney which transforms all her relationships: her existence becomes charged with a meaning which communicates itself to those around her. From this simple scenario Patrick White unfurls a monumental exploration of the tides of love and hate, comedy and tragedy, impotence and longing that fester within family relationships.

Set in Australia in the 1840s, A FRINGE OF LEAVES combines dramatic action with a finely distilled moral vision. Returning home to England from Van Diemen's land, the Bristol Maid is shipwrecked on the Queensland coast and Mrs Roxburgh is taken prisoner by a tribe of aborigines, along with the rest of the passengers and crew. In the course of her escape, she is torn by conflicting loyalties - to her dead husband, to her rescuer, to her own and to her adoptive class.

In White's 1973 classic, terrifying matriarch Elizabeth Hunter is facing death while her impatient children--Sir Basil, the celebrated actor, and Princess de Lascabane, an adoptive French aristocrat--wait. It is the dying mother who will command attention, and who in the midst of disaster will look into the eye of the storm. "An antipodean King Lear writ gentle and tragicomic, almost Chekhovian . . . "The""Eye of the Storm " is] an intensely dramatic masterpiece" ("The Australian").

Hurtle Duffield, a painter, coldly dissects the weaknesses of any and all who enter his circle. His sisteras deformity, a groceras moonlight indiscretion, the passionate illusions of the women who love himaall are used as fodder for his art. It is only when Hurtle meets an egocentric adolescent whom he sees as his spiritual child does he experience a deeper, more treacherous emotion in this tour de force of sexual and psychological menace that sheds brutally honest light on the creative experience.

Eddie Twyborn is bisexual and beautiful, the son of a Judge and a drunken mother. His search for identity, self-affirmation and love takes us into the ambiguous landscapes, sexual, psychological and spiritual, of the human condition.