The New York Times has described Gerald Murnane as ‘‘the greatest living English-language writer most people have never heard of.’’ A long-time favourite for the Nobel Prize in Literature, the New Yorker describes him as the ‘‘reclusive giant of Australian letters.’’

He’s a fascinating, eccentric person, a man who notes with pride that he has never flown in an airplane or gone swimming or ever worn sunglasses over the course of his entire life. He lives in a dusty town of just two hundred people in Western Victoria and regards the ocean as an ‘‘enemy.’’ He writes of ‘‘dreams within dreams’’ and ‘‘the invisible landscape and geography of the soul’’ and he taught himself Hungarian because he felt a shared affinity with the plains of Hungary.

He maintains: ‘‘There is another world but it is in this one.” Needless to say, he is a singul ...