Dark Palace (67 page)
Authors: Frank Moorhouse
Cold Light
Frank Moorhouse
The third and final part in the epic story of Edith Campbell Berry.
It is 1950, the League of Nations has collapsed and the newly formed United Nations has rejected all those who worked and fought for the League. Edith Campbell Berry and her now husband Ambrose Westwood are back from one of the oldest cities of the world to live in the newest city of the world. Canberra.
Edith has ambitions to be Australia's first female Ambassador, but finds her ambitions thwarted in this area, and instead vigorously involves herself in the building of the new centre of civilisation. Frederick, Edith's brother, who disappeared from her life before she left Australia, reacquaints himself with her. He introduces her to the Australian Communist Party, but it is not a safe time to be a Communist in Australia â or, perhaps, to be related to one.
It is also not a safe time to be âa wife with a lavender husband'. After pursuing the Bloomsbury life for many years, Edith finds herself fearful of being exposed. She also yearns for a family, and when she meets Richard again, the man who had audaciously laid his hand on her leg at a dinner party hosted by Prime Minister Menzies, it seems he could offer her not only security but a family.
Intelligent, poignant and absorbing, the final instalment in the Edith trilogy confirms Frank Moorhouse as one of Australia's greatest writers.
Frank Moorhouse was born in the coastal town of Nowra, NSW. He worked as an editor of small-town newspapers and as an administrator, and became a full-time writer in the 1970s. He has written fiction, non-fiction, screenplays and essays, and edited many collections of writing.
Forty-Seventeen
was given a laudatory full-page review by Angela Carter in
The New York Times
and was named Book of the Year by
The Age
and âmoral winner' of the Booker Prize by the London magazine
Blitz
.
Grand Days
, the first novel in The Edith Trilogy, won the SA Premier's Award for Fiction.
Dark Palace
won the 2001 Miles Franklin Literary Award and was shortlisted for the NSW Premier's Literary Award, the Victorian Premier's Literary Award and the
Age
Book of the Year Award.
Moorhouse has undertaken numerous fellowships and his work has been translated into several languages. He was made a member of the Order of Australia for services to literature in 1985 and was awarded an honorary doctorate from Griffith University in 1997.
FICTION
Futility and Other Animals
The Americans, Baby
The Electrical Experience
Tales of Mystery and Romance
Conference-ville
The Everlasting Secret Family and Other Secrets
Forty-Seventeen
Grand Days
Cold Light
OTHER BOOKS
Room Service
Lateshows
Loose Living
NON-FICTION
Days of Wine and Rage
Martini: A Memoir
COLLECTED WORKS
Selected Stories (also published as The Coca-Cola Kid)
FILM AND TELEVISION SCRIPTS
Between Wars (feature film)
Coca-Cola Kid (feature film)
Everlasting Secret Family (feature film)
Conference-ville (telemovie)
Time's Raging (with Sophia Turkiewicz, telemovie)
The Disappearance of Azaria Chamberlain (docudrama)
*
denotes actual person
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted by any person or entity, including internet search engines or retailers, in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including printing, photocopying (except under the statutory exceptions provisions of the Australian
Copyright Act 1968),
recording, scanning or by any information storage and retrieval system without the prior written permission of Random House Australia. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the authors and publishers rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
Version 1.0
Dark Palace
9781742752716
Published by Random House Australia 2011
Copyright © Frank Moorhouse
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
A Vintage book
Published by Random House Australia Pty Ltd
Level 3,100 Pacific Highway, North Sydney NSW, 2060
www.randomhouse.com.au
Addresses for companies within the Random House Group can be found at
www.randomhouse.com.au/offices
First published by Random House Australia in 2000
First published by Vintage in 2001
National Library of Australia
Cataloguing-in-Publication Entry
Moorhouse, Frank, 1938-
Dark palace / Frank Moorhouse
ISBN 978 1 74275 270 9 (pbk)
League of Nations - History - Fiction.
Man - woman relationships - Fiction.
Women diplomats - Fiction.
Geneva (Switzerland) - Fiction.
Australia - Fiction.
A823.3
Cover design by Gayna Murphy
Cover photography: image of woman in a grey wool suit
© Condé Nast Archive / Corbis; background image
© Cindy Yamanaka / ZUMA Press / Corbis.
This book was assisted by the Commonwealth Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory board. The book was completed through the generosity of King's College, Cambridge, where the author was writer-in-residence in 1999.
