A Lifetime on Clouds (Text Classics)

Author(s): Gerald Murnane

Australian Fiction

Adrian Sherd is a teenage boy in Melbourne of the 1950s - the last years before television and the family car changed suburbia forever. Earnest and isolated, tormented by his hormones and his religious devotion, Adrian dreams of elaborate orgies with American film stars, and of marrying his sweetheart and fathering 11 children by her. He even dreams a history of the world as a chronicle of sexual frustration. A Lifetime on Clouds is funny, honest and sweetly told: a less ribald, Catholic Australian Portnoy's Complaint (Random House, 1969).


Product Information

Gerald Murnane was born in Melbourne in 1939. He spent some of his childhood in country Victoria before returning to Melbourne, where he lived for the next sixty years. In 1957 Murnane began training for the Catholic priesthood but soon abandoned this in favour of becoming a primary-school teacher. He later taught creative writing. His first novel, Tamarisk Row, was published in 1974. It was followed by A Lifetime on Clouds, The Plains and five other works of fiction, the most recent of which is A History of Books. In 1999 he won the Patrick White Award. Ten years later he won the Melbourne Prize for Literature and, after the death of his wife, moved to north-west Victoria.

General Fields

  • : 9781922147455
  • : Text Publishing Company
  • : Text Publishing Company
  • : August 2013
  • : November 2013
  • : books

Special Fields

  • : Gerald Murnane
  • : Paperback