Voss

First UK edition. Crown 8vo. 478pp. Blue buckram boards, lettered in silver to spine. Book Society Choice blurb to front flap of Sidney Nolan designed dustwrapper, bearing printer's code 6/4137 and priced at 16s net.

Offsetting to endpapers, top edge dusted, lightly tanned and soiled dust wrapper rubbed to edges, else Near Fine.

Inaugural winner of the 1958 Miles Franklin Prize, as well as the W.H. Smith Award for most outstanding contribution to English literature, 1957/58. Listed among The Guardian's 100 Best Novels Written in English, as selected by Robert McCrum.

Making extensive use of religious symbolism, the author's fifth novel is an epic journey into a continent's interior, both in a physical and spiritual sense. It was loosely based upon the records of the 19th-century Prussian explorer and naturalist Ludwig Leichhardt who disappeared whilst on an expedition into the Australian outback. In his 1990 essay "The Prodigal Son", White names both Edward John Eyre (1815 – 1901) and Ludwig Leichardt (1813 – 48) as a source of direct inspiration. Fittingly, the Swedish Academy's citation upon its awarding of the 1973 Nobel Prize in Literature was "for an epic and psychological narrative art which has introduced a new continent into literature".

Voss was adapted into the opera of the same name by composer Richard Meale in collaboration with librettist David Malouf. Premiered at the 1986 Adelaide Festival of Arts, under the baton of Stuart Challender, the production was directed by Jim Sharman, before transferring to the Sydney Opera House.

[Critical Essays on Patrick White, Ed. Peter Wolfe. Boston: G.K. Hall & Co., 1990. 21–24; Hubber and Smith G2a]