Every city, town and village has its memorial to war. Nowhere are these more eloquent than in Australia, generations of whose young men have enlisted to fight other people's battles - from Gallipoli and the Somme to Malaya and Vietnam. InThe Great World, his finest novel yet, David Malouf gives a voice to that experience. ButThe Great Worldis more than a novel of war. Ranging over seventy years of Australian life, from Sydney's teeming King's Cross to the tranquil backwaters of the Hawkesbury River, it is a remarkable novel of self-knowledge and lost innocence, of survival and witness.

David Malouf is the internationally acclaimed author of novels includingThe Great World(winner of the Commonwealth Writers' prize and the Prix Femina Etranger),Remembering Babylon(shortlisted for the Booker Prize and winner of the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award),An Imaginary Life,Conversations at Curlow Creek, Dream Stuff('These stories are pearls'Spectator),Every Move You Make('Rare and luminous talent'Guardian), his autobiographical classic12 Edmondstone StreetandRansom. HisCollected Storieswon the 2008 Australia-Asia Literary Award. In 2008 Malouf was the Scottish Arts' Council Muriel Spark International Fellow. Born in 1934 in Brisbane, where he was brought up, he lives in Sydney.

Winner of the Commonwealth Prize, this astonishing novel invites us on a journey far across time - covering some seventy years - and space - ranging across Australia - and deep into the human heart.