For the two men in this novel, war was supposed to be a testing ground. But it proved to be an ordeal of a different kind.Winner of theCommonwealth Prize, this astonishing novel invites us on a journey far across time - covering some seventy years - and space - ranging across Australia - and deep into the human heart."Lucid and accessible. His most ambitious book so far."  -The GuardianEvery city, town and village has its memorial to war. Nowhere are these more eloquent than in Australia, generations of whose young men have enlisted to fight other people's battles - from Gallipoli and the Somme to Malaya and Vietnam. InThe Great World,David Maloufgives a voice to that experience. ButThe Great Worldis more than a novel of war. Ranging over seventy years of Australian life, from Sydney's teeming King's Cross to the tranquil backwaters of the Hawkesbury River, it is a remarkable novel of self-knowledge and lost innocence, of survival and witness."An example of how fiction may still be individual, honest and humanly truthful. Malouf's great talent is precisely for unmasking the epic or world-historical - for finding the human backing to history's all-reflecting mirror."-The Times