Happy Valley

By: Patrick White

Narrated by: Peter Hosking

Patrick White's magnificent debut, first published 1939. This mesmerising first novel gives us a prolonged glimpse of literary genius in the making. Based on Patrick White's own experiences in the early 1930s as a jackaroo at Bolaro, near Adaminaby in Southeastern 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.

Happy Valley is a place of dreams and secrets, of snow and ice and wind. In this remote little town, perched in its landscape of desolate beauty, everybody has a story to tell about loss and longing and loneliness, about their passion to escape. I must get away, thinks Dr Oliver Halliday, thinks Alys Browne, thinks Sidney Furlow. But Happy Valley is not a place that can be easily left, and White's vivid characters, with their distinctive voices, move bit by bit towards sorrow and acceptance.

Happy Valley is Patrick White's first novel, published in London in 1939, when White was 27. It was praised by, among others, Graham Greene and Elizabeth Bowen and won the Australian Literature Gold Medal in 1941. But, fearing that he had libelled one of the families portrayed in the novel, White did not allow the novel to be republished in English in his lifetime.

©1939 Patrick White (P)2017 Bolinda Publishing Pty Ltd

Critic reviews

"The outstanding figure in Australian fiction." ( The New York Times)

"One of the greatest magicians of fiction.... White's scope is vast and his invention endless." ( The Observer)

"Patrick White is, in the finest sense, a world novelist. His themes are catholic and complex and he pursues them with a single-minded energy and vision." ( The Guardian)