Author(s): Patrick White

Hardback fiction

Eddie Twyborn is bisexual and beautiful, the son of a Judge and a drunken mother. With his androgynous hero - Eudoxia/Eddie/Eadith Twyborn - and through his search for identity, for self-affirmation and love in its many forms, this title takes us into the ambiguous landscapes, sexual, psychological and spiritual, of the human condition.   The wealthy, middle-aged Australian, Mrs E. Boyd Golson, victim of her social and sexual doubts, was stirred by the mere glimpse of the romantic Eudoxia, Empress/hetaira of that Byzantine exile, Angelos Vatatzes, as the couple idled in the unkempt garden of their cottage just beyond St Mayeul. She would explain her agitation in a letter to Eadie, the drunken wife of circumspect Mr Justice Twyborn. It was she who had first introduced Joanie to 'the other life'. A few months later, when Eudoxia had buried her emperor, a striking young Lieutenant, Eddie Twyborn DSO, moodily paced the deck of his ship bound for Australia, the reunion with his incongruous parents and the bed of Marcia Lushington in remote 'Bogong' Woolambi where he would seek solace in toil on the land. In Chelsea, flamboyant whore-mistress Mrs Eadith Trist, set up in business by Gravenor, the dilettante peer, had become a cult, indulged even by the officially respectable. She, like the others in Patrick White's towering, tantalizing novel is catapulted as fate demands. They all coast alongside one another, attracted yet rejected or rejecting - those most balanced in their outward behaviour being the most inwardly disturbed. Developing in 1914, the revealing, disquieting narrative sweeps from French resort to a bleak corner of New South Wales, then to London streets and the apocalyptic blaze of the Second World War.

No dustjacket