Homesickness

The wildly funny novel-never published before in the United States-that put Murray Bail on the literary map.

Thirteen men and women on a package tour travel the world, visiting museums, hotels, and shops. They are like tourists anywhere, except that wherever they go-Africa, England, South America, New York, or Russia-they find nothing is as it seems. Challenged by unexpected propositions, differences, and subtleties of life and history, Murray Bail's tourists are in turn repelled, attracted, altered. As the Nobel laureate Patrick White put it, Homesickness, with its "tourists permanently traipsing through the museums of their own obsessions," is the work of "a visual writer with great understanding of sensual man." It is surely one of the most distinctive, original Australian novels of recent times.