TO THE ISLANDS

Exhausted and losing faith, an Anglican minister flees his mission in Australia's northwest for the vast emptiness of the outback. In the soul country of the desert the old man searches for the islands of the Aboriginal dead, reflecting on past transgressions and on his life's work. A Lear-like tale of madness and destruction, published when Randolph Stow was only twenty-two, To the Islands is compelling and wise—a poetic masterpiece.

Julian Randolph ‘Mick' Stow was born in Geraldton, Western Australia, in 1935. His first collection of poetry won the Australian Literature Society's Gold Medal in 1957—as did the prolific young writer's third novel, To the Islands, the following year. To the Islands also won the 1958 Miles Franklin Literary Award. In the 1960s he lectured at universities in Australia and England, and lived in America on a Harkness fellowship. In 1969 he settled permanently in England. He received the 1979 Patrick White Award. Overall, he published eight novels, four collections of poetry, a book for children, and several libretti.

Randolph Stow died in 2010, aged seventy-four. A private man, a prodigiously gifted yet intermittently silent author, he has been hailed as ‘the least visible figure of that great twentieth-century triumvirate of Australian novelists whose other members are Patrick White and Christina Stead'.