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Frank Delage, a middle-aged Australian, arrives in Vienna with the most daring of propositions. He has invented a revolutionary piano and means to market it to the grand old world of classical music. A chance meeting with one Amalia von Schalla brings new possibilities - a soiree, an introduction to her daughter Elisabeth, dinner with an avant-garde composer. But when the sheer audacity of his campaign dawns on him, he takes a slow boat home to the southern hemisphere. As it meanders through the Mediterranean and the Suez Canal, he is afforded ample time to reflect on tensions between the old world and the new. And, for all his travails, he is not going home empty-handed...
About the author
Born in Adelaide in 1941, Murray Bail now lives in Sydney. His fiction, which includes Eucalyptus, Holden's Performance, Homesickness and The Drover's Wife and Other Stories, has been translated into more than twenty-five languages, winning a number of major awards.
Summary
Frank Delage, a middle-aged Australian, arrives in Vienna with the most daring of propositions. He has invented a revolutionary piano and means to market it to the grand old world of classical music. A chance meeting with one Amalia von Schalla brings new possibilities - a soirée, an introduction to her daughter Elisabeth, dinner with an avant-garde composer.
But when the sheer audacity of his campaign dawns on him, he takes a slow boat home to the southern hemisphere. As it meanders through the Mediterranean and the Suez Canal, he is afforded ample time to reflect on tensions between the old world and the new. And, for all his travails, he is not going home empty-handed...
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'His works are to be savoured for their elegant artifice ... This is particularly true of The Voyage' Andrew Reimer, Sydney Morning Herald. Sydney Morning Herald
