David Malouf has 4 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 2 narrators, with an average listener rating of 5★ across 5 ratings. The most-rated is An Imaginary Life.
An Imaginary Life
Summary
The Roman poet Ovid, exiled to a remote village on the edge of the Black Sea, tells the story of his meeting with a feral boy, brought up among wild animals in the snow. It is a luminous encounter between civilisation and nature. In the first century AD, Publius Ovidius Naso, the most urbane and irreverant poet of imperial Rome, was banished to a remote village on the edge of the Black Sea. From these sparse facts, one of our most distinguished novelists has fashioned an audacious and supremely moving work of fiction. Marooned on the edge of the known world, exiled from his native tongue, Ovid depends on the kindness of barbarians who impate their dead and converse with the spirit world. But then he becomes the guardian of a still more savage creature, a feral child who has grown up among deer. What ensues is a luminous encounter between civilisation and nature, as enacted by a poet who once catalogued the treacheries of love and a boy who slowly learns how to give it.
©1978 David Malouf (P)2019 Bolinda Publishing Pty Ltd
Remembering Babylon
Summary
A young boy caught in the conflict between early British settlers and native Aborigines witnesses the barbaric tensions that bedevilled the birth of a nation in this profound and mythical novel. In the 1840s, a ship's boy, cast ashore in northern Australia, is taken in by Aborigines. 16 years later he steps out of the bush and inadvertently confronts the new white settlers with their unspoken terrors. A searing and magnificent picture of Australia at the time of its foundation, focusing on the hostility between early British settlers and native Aboriginals, Remembering Babylon tells the tragic and compelling story of a boy caught between both worlds - the civilised and the primitive. Shot through with humour, and written with the poetic intensity that characterised Malouf's An Imaginary Life, this is a novel of epic scope yet it is simple, compassionate and universal: a classic.
©1993 David Malouf (P)2019 Bolinda Publishing Pty Ltd
Fly Away Peter
Summary
A cast of wildly different characters, united by a love of birds, come together on the coast of Australia in 1914. Their avian idyll is soon disturbed as war rips through Europe, irrevocably changing and challenging their lives. For three very different people brought together by their love for birds, life on the Queensland coast in 1914 is the timeless and idyllic world of sandpipers, ibises and kingfishers. In another hemisphere civilisation rushes headlong into a brutal conflict. Life there is lived from moment to moment. Inevitably, the two young men - sanctuary owner and employee - are drawn to the war and into the mud and horror of the trenches of Armentieres. Alone on the beach, their friend Imogen, the middle-aged wildlife photographer, must acknowledge for all three of them that the past cannot be held.
©1982 David Malouf (P)2019 Bolinda Publishing Pty Ltd
The Great World
Summary
A novel of intense perception and formidable power from one of Australia's most celebrated authors. Every city, town and village has its memorial to war. Nowhere are these more eloquent than in Australia, generations of whose young men have enlisted to fight other people's battles - from Gallipoli and the Somme to Malaya and Vietnam. In The Great World, his finest novel yet, David Malouf gives a voice to that experience. But The Great World is more than a novel of war. Ranging over 70 years of Australian life, from Sydney's teeming King's Cross to the tranquil backwaters of the Hawkesbury River, it is a remarkable novel of self-knowledge and lost innocence, of survival and witness.
©1990 David Malouf (P)2019 Bolinda Publishing