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  • Published: 26 October 2011
  • ISBN: 9781742746586
  • Imprint: Random House Australia
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 288

The Everlasting Secret Family




‘Sometimes the way they misunderstood each other was more interesting than what they'd meant to say.'

‘Sometimes the way they misunderstood each other was more interesting than what they'd meant to say.'

'Sometimes they completed each other's sentences or said the second sentence of the other's conversation. Sometimes Backhouse completed Irving's sentences in a much better way, although sometimes along altogether different lines of meaning. But he usually let it go and went with the new meaning contributed by Backhouse, wherever it went. Sometimes the way they misunderstood each other was more interesting than what they'd meant to say.'

Within Frank Moorhouse's four stories in The Everlasting Secret Family, each complete in itself but together creating a reverberating atmosphere and the suggestion of unrevealed connections, there are all manner of intriguing secrets. The stories abound with secret brotherhood, with foreigners defying all attempts at assimilation, with strangers whose only real identification marks are the secrets they carry.

And they're still as shocking and thought-provoking today as they were when they were first published nearly thirty years ago.

  • Published: 26 October 2011
  • ISBN: 9781742746586
  • Imprint: Random House Australia
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 288

About the author

Frank Moorhouse

Frank Moorhouse was born in the coastal town of Nowra, NSW. He worked as an editor of small-town newspapers and as an administrator and in 1970s became a full-time writer. He won national prizes for his fiction, non-fiction, and essays. He was best known for the highly acclaimed Edith trilogy, Grand Days, Dark Palace, and Cold Light, novels which follow the career of an Australian woman in the League of Nations in the 1920s and 1930s through to the International Atomic Energy Agency in the 1970s as she struggled to become a diplomat. His last book The Drover’s Wifea reading adventure published in October 2017, brings together works inspired by Henry Lawson’s story and examines the attachment Australia has to the story and to Russell Drysdale’s painting of the same name. Frank was awarded a number of fellowships including writer in residence at King’s College Cambridge, a Fulbright Fellowship, and a fellowship at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington. His work has been translated into several languages. He was made a member of the Order of Australia for services to literature in 1985 and was made a Doctor of the University by Griffith University in 1997 and a Doctor of Letters (honoris causa) by the University of Sydney, 2015. Frank Moorhouse died, in Sydney, on 26 June 2022.

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Praise for The Everlasting Secret Family

Moorhouse is at his best when he writes with epigrammatic brevity, throwing away lines like a latterday, down under, laid back Zarathustra or Socrates

Nation Review

[Moorhouse] comes in this volume to explore and probe . . . These are all stories of disillusionment, of cul-de-sacs of the imagination. They have a seductive power, speaking as they do to the last dreamer in all of us, and they show Moorhouse at his most mordant and sophisticated best

The Age