Join J. M. Coetzee and Thomas Keneally in rediscovering Nobel Laureate Patrick White In 1973, Australian writer Patrick White was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature "for an epic and psychological narrative art which has introduced a new continent into literature." Set in nineteenth-century Australia, Voss is White's best-known book, a sweeping novel about a secret passion between the explorer Voss and the young orphan Laura. As Voss is tested by hardship, mutiny, and betrayal during his crossing of the brutal Australian desert, Laura awaits his return in Sydney, where she endures their months of separation as if her life were a dream and Voss the only reality. Marrying a sensitive rendering of hidden love with a stark adventure narrative, Voss is a novel of extraordinary power and virtuosity from a twentieth-century master. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators. Patrick White  (1912-1990) was born in England in 1912, when his parents were in Europe for two years; at six months he was taken back to Australia, where his father owned a sheep station. When he was thirteen, he went to school in England, to Cheltenham, “where it was understood, the climate would be temperate and a colonial acceptable.” Neither proved true, and after four rather miserable years there he went to King’s College, Cambridge, where he specialized in languages. After leaving the university he settled in London, determined to become a writer. His first novel, Happy Valley, was published in 1939 and his second,  The Living and the Dead , in 1941. During the war he was an RAF Intelligence Officer in the Middle East and Greece. After the war he returned to Australia. His novels include  The Aunt’s Story  (1946),  The Tree of Man  (1956),  Voss  (1957),  Riders in the Chariot  (1961),  The Solid Mandala  (1966),  The Eye of the Storm (1973),  A Fringe of Leaves  (1976), and  The Twyborn Affair  (1979). He also published two collections of short stories,  The Burnt Ones  (1964) and  The Cockatoos  (1974), which incorporates several short novels, a collection of novellas,  Three Uneasy Pieces  (1987), and his autobiography, Flaws in the Glass (1981). He also edited  Memoirs of Many in One  (1986). In 1973 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Upon his death,  The Times  wrote, “Patrick White did more than any other writer to put Australian literature on the international map.… His tormented oeuvre is that of a great and essentially modern writer.”  Thomas Keneally has won international acclaim for his novels Schindler's Ark , Confederates , Gossip from the Forest , Playmaker , Woman of the Inner Sea , and A River Town . He is most recently the author of the biography American Scoundrel: The Life of the Notorious Civil War General Dan Sickles . From the introduction   Introduction     Out on the wastes of the Never-Never, That’s where the dead men lie! That’s where the heat-waves dance for ever – That’s where the dead men lie! Barcroft Boake, Where the Dead Men Lie   Human relationships are vast as deserts Patrick White, Voss     Patrick White is one of the great novelists of the twentieth century, on a par with his fellow Nobel Laureates William Faulkner, Halldór Laxness and Thomas Mann; and yet, one hundred years after his birth, his name seems temporarily and inexplicably lost in the immense desert spaces to which he introduced a new generation of readers, buried like one of those legions of Herodotus, beneath the glare and flies and red Australian sand.   Unsentimental, White predicted as much for himself. In 1981 after yet another project to film Voss had aborted, he wrote to the director Joseph Losey: ‘I’m a dated novelist, whom hardly anyone reads, or if they do, most of them don’t understand what I am on about. Certainly I wish I’d never written Voss , which is going to be everybody’s albatross. You could have died of him, somewhere in an Australian desert, so it’s fortunate you were frustrated.’   To those who believe in the replenishing powers of fiction to lead you into a region different from any that you have been capable of imagining hitherto, and then to leave you, if for a flicker, with an uplifting sense that you are yourself a slightly different person (while paradoxically someone who understands themselves a little better), the fading of White’s reputation is a stain. It was through works like Voss and his other ‘historical’ masterpiece A Fringe of Leaves – plus novels like The Tree of Man , Riders in t