Murray Bail's The Voyage

       There's a new Murray Bail novel out -- at least in Australia. Text is bringing out The Voyage -- see their publicity page -- and while MacLehose Press has a UK edition due out in January (see their publicity page, or pre-order your copy from Amazon.co.uk), I can't find an American edition yet.
       Peter Craven reviews it in the Sydney Morning Herald and he likes it:

The jigsaw-puzzle, collage effect of The Voyage's narrative is, in practice, ravishing. (...) The Voyage is a beautiful book, sumptuously executed for all the apparent slenderness of its narrative line.

       The review also contains one of the saddest and most irrelevant lines I've come across in any book review recently, as he writes about Bail's:

Eucalyptus, which almost became a film with Russell Crowe and Nicole Kidman

       As if that meant anything. (It's the book that counts, not some two-bit pseudo-stars of the day (or yesterday) who might have appeared in some screen version, had it come to that.)