Eucalyptus by Murray Bail won both the Miles Franklin Award and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize in 1999.
On a property in New South Wales, a man named Holland lives with his daughter, Ellen. When Ellen turns nineteen, her father announces his decision: she will marry the first man who can name all the eucalypts, down to the last tree. As suitors struggle to meet the challenge, Ellen encounters a strange young man among her father’s trees – a storyteller with enchanting tales of faraway lands.
‘Murray Bail is the warmest and quick-witted of storytellers. You will never forget what is at the heart of this book: one of the great and most surprising courtships in literature’ Michael Ondaatje
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