Gerald Murnane is widely recognised as one of our country’s most significant literary figures – but only one of his novels, The Plains, is available. Until now. For the first time in 20 years, his masterful first novel is back in print. Based on Murnane’s own early years, Tamarisk Row is an unsparing evocation of a Catholic childhood of the 1940s. Clement Killeaton transforms his father's obsession with gambling, his mother's piety, the cruelty of his fellow pupils and the mysterious but forbidden attractions of sex, into an imagined world centred on horse-racing, played in the dusty backyard of his home, across the landscapes of the district, and the continent of Australia.