Every city, town and village has its memorial to war. Nowhere are these monuments more eloquent than in Australia, generations of whose young men have enlisted to fight other people's battles - from Gallipoli to the Somme to Malaya and Vietnam. In 'The Great World' is more than a novel of war. Ranging over seventy years of Australian life, from Sydney's teeming Kings Cross to the tranquil backwaters of the Hawkesbury River, it is a remarkable novel of self-knowledge and lost innocence, of survival and witness.
