The Vera Wright Trilogy: My Father's Moon / Cabin Fever / The Georges' Wife (The Vera Wright Series) - Softcover

Jolley, Elizabeth

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0892553529 ISBN 13: 9780892553525

Publisher: Persea, 2010

Synopsis

This moving masterpiece by one of Australia’s leading novelists―now in its entirety―inaugurates Persea’s series of Elizabeth Jolley revivals.

Set in 1940s wartime England, the trilogy follows young Vera, who leaves her cultivated Midlands home to become a nurse in a military hospital and is catapulted into adulthood through unorthodox love entanglements with both men and women, two illegitimate children, and finally emigration to Australia, where, from her new vantage point―now a doctor and writer―she looks back on her life’s journey. Combining the beauty of Virginia Woolf with the spare, heartbreaking insightfulness of Jean Rhys, the trilogy is both a literary tour de force and an accessible, universal portrait of a woman in search of sustaining love.

The concluding volume, The Georges’ Wife, is published here for the first time in the US. The first two volumes have long been out of print. North American readers can now experience “the most ambitious and accomplished work in Jolley’s oeuvre” (J. M. Coetzee).

About this title

About the Author:

Elizabeth Jolley (1923-2007) is one of Australia’s most celebrated writers, with a formidable international reputation, and during the 1980s and 1990s was widely acclaimed with a wide readership in the U. S. Born in England in 1923, she was brought up in a strict, German-speaking household and attended a Quaker boarding school. She became a nurse, married, and with three children moved to Western Australia in 1959. Although she wrote all her life, it was not until she was in her fifties that her books started to receive the recognition they deserved. Her work won every major award in Australia, and was several times selected as a New York Times Notable Book. Excerpts from her novels (including Cabin Fever, Book 2 in the Trilogy) were published in The New Yorker. Her novels include The Sugar Mother, Foxybaby, Miss Peabody's Inheritance, and Mr. Scobie's Riddle. Elizabeth Jolley died in 2007.

Review:

“[A] lyrically written, imaginatively observed and emotionally compelling work.”
- Publishers Weekly

“Vera is a remarkable protagonist, a quiet rebel involved in a struggle with societal and familial expectations. . . . Jolley deserves to be counted among the great voices of the past century, and her trilogy deserves to be read, discussed, and adored.”
- San Francisco Book Review

“It’s not often that I discover a writer who creates a character who I wish could be a real life friend....[The Vera Wright Trilogy] is a beautiful, rich, and layered masterpiece.”
- Nina Sankovitch, The Huffington Post

“Full of mystery . . . [and] many, many pleasures―a string of characters worthy of Dickens, Jolley’s joy in nature, in the sense of place, her love of poetry and music. . . . something to re-read, again and again.”
- Roberta Silman, World Books Review

“A work of emotional depth and beauty, which will be enjoyed by anyone who likes to wrap themselves in compelling, artful fiction.”
- MostlyFiction

“Jolley makes the inner life of her protagonist the dramatic center of her work, giving the reader what feels like unfettered access to the emotional and psychological impact of any given moment.”
- NewPages

“Jolley’s almost magical prose imbues the ordinary events of Vera’s life with an incandescent strangeness.”
- Howard County Times (Maryland)

“The most ambitious and accomplished work in Elizabeth Jolley’s oeuvre.”
- J. M. Coetzee

“Jolley transports us to ‘the twilight between the fact and the imagined’. . . .Just open this book to any page to see the strange, beautiful music she makes out of the raw material of her life.”
- Karen Russell, author of St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves

About this edition

• Publisher: Persea
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 0892553529
• ISBN 13: 9780892553525
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 568