A season on Earth / Gerald Murnane.

A Lifetime on Clouds first published by William Heinemann, Australia, 1976.

Lost to the world for more than four decades, A season on Earth is the essential link between two acknowledged masterpieces by Gerald Murnane: the lyrical account of boyhood in his debut novel, Tamarisk Row, and the revolutionary prose of The Plains. It is Murnane?s second novel as it was intended to be, bringing together all of its four sections, the first two of which were published as A lifetime on clouds in 1976 and the last two of which have never been in print. A hilarious tale of a lustful teenager in 1950s Melbourne, A lifetime on clouds has been considered an outlier in Murnane?s fiction. Here, at last, is sixteen-year-old Adrian?s journey in full, from fantasies about orgies with American film stars and idealised visions of suburban marital bliss to his struggles as a Catholic novice, and finally a burgeoning sense of the boundless imaginative possibilities to be found in literature and landscapes.