A SEASON ON EARTH

Gerald Murnane's revelatory portrait of the artist as a young man is one of the missing pieces in the puzzle of contemporary literature. Murnane's second novel is the essential link between his spellbinding debut novel of childhood, TAMARISK ROW, and his third novel, THE PLAINS, the book in which he found his revolutionary path forward.

A SEASON ON EARTH tells the tale of Adrian Sherd, whose journey takes him from lustful fantasies about American movie stars, from idealised visions of suburban marital bliss and struggles as a student-priest, to his discovery of the imaginative possibilities contained in literature and landscape.

After Murnane originally submitted A SEASON ON EARTH to Heinemann, his editor told him that he would publish only the first half of the manuscript. Murnane reluctantly agreed to cut his novel in two, and this was published under the title A LIFETIME ON CLOUDS in 1977. The author tells the whole publishing story in the introduction he has written for this complete edition.

Text Publishing publishes this lost gem in February 2019 in honour of Gerald Murnane's 80th birthday.