(London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1957).

FIRST EDITION OF THE NOBEL PRIZE WINNER'S FIFTH NOVEL AND KNOWN BY MANY AS HIS BEST. "Its plot is of epic simplicity. In the year 1845 Johan Ulrich Voss sets out to cross the Australian continent for the first time. He collects around himself a small party of settlers and two aboriginals, and pushes inland from the coast. The expedition encounters every kind of obstacle and hardship. At one time the men have to pass through a waterless desert; at another, torrential rains fall unceasingly and they are driven to shelter in a cave where they lie up, week after week...the most important thing in this book is not the external world through which the characters pass, but rather the world of their passions and their moments of insight; and in this world the figure of Voss looms larger and larger until it assumes more than the normal dimensions of a man....This is, in all its parts, a most distinguished book. It is written with the subtle, penetrating knowledge of motive and character for which Patrick White is known. It tells the story of the expedition with a great power of narrative and it creates in Voss himself an epic figure who is both the symbol and the forerunner of a people's destiny. Above all it carries that stamp of authority and that sense of scale and seriousness to which only a few writers in any generation can lay claim." - the publisher. Item #31610

First Edition. 8vo, publisher's original navy cloth, lettered in silver on the spine, in the pictorially decorated dustjacket, designed by Sydney Nolan. 478 pp. A very good copy indeed, the book in very pleasing condition, clean, bright and tight, the jacket with only light rubbing to the extremities.