Clement Killeaton transforms his father's gambling, his mother's piety,
his fellow pupils' cruelty and the mysterious but forbidden attractions
of sex into an imagined world centred on horse-racing and played out in
the dusty backyard of his home, across the landscapes of the district,
and the continent of Australia. An unsparing evocation of a Catholic
childhood in a country town in the late 1940s, Tamarisk Row's lyrical
prose is charged with the yearning, boredom, fear and fascination of
boyhood.
First published in Australia in 1974, and previously unpublished in the
UK, Tamarisk Row is Gerald Murnane's debut novel, and in many respects
his masterpiece.