Homesickness (novel)

Homesickness (1980) is a novel by Australian writer Murray Bail. It was originally published by Macmillan in Australia in 1980.^[1]

It won both The Age Book of the Year Award and The Age Book of the Year Fiction Awards in 1980. It shared both awards with David Ireland's novel A Woman of the Future.

The novel follows a group of thirteen Australian travelling together on a package tour that takes in Africa, England, Ecuador, New York and Moscow.

• co-winner The Age Book of the Year Awards — Fiction 1980^[2]
• co-winner The Age Book of the Year 1980^[3]

Suzanne Edgar, writing in The Canberra Times noted: "The group of Australians abroad, their attitudes and tastes are satirised and sent up from the superior viewpoint of the artist-observer: blind Kaddok is always taking photographs, while socially withdrawn Shiela sends hundreds of post-cards. Each tourist is tabbed by one or two stereotyped attributes that do no more than narrowly differentiate the one from the other...Bail disdains the dun-coloured realism of much Australian writing but his own prose, while certainly unrealistic, is not so psychedelic."^[4]

In a letter to the Swedish critic Ingmar Björkstén, Patrick White called Homesickness, "a most original & imaginative novel. We actually have some writers at last. Not much else can be said for Australia at the moment."^[5]

After its original publication in 1980 in Australia by publisher Macmillan,^[6] the novel was later published as follows:

• Penguin Books, Australia, 1981
• Faber and Faber, UK 1986
• Text Publishing, Australia, 1998 and 2012
• Farrar Straus & Giroux, USA, 1999

• 1980 in Australian literature