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    An Imaginary Life

    Part of Vintage International

    Author David Malouf
    Look inside
    Paperback
    $15.00 US
    Knopf | Vintage
    5.23"W x 7.99"H x 0.39"D   | 6 oz | 72 per carton
    On sale May 28, 1996 | 160 Pages | 9780679767930
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    In the first century A.D., Publius Ovidius Naso, the most urbane and irreverent poet of imperial Rome, was banished to a remote village on the edge of the Black Sea. From these sparse facts, Malouf has fashioned an audacious and supremely moving novel. Marooned on the edge of the known world, exiled from his native tongue, Ovid depends on the kindness of barbarians who impale their dead and converse with the spirit world.Then he becomes the guardian of a still more savage creature, a feral child who has grown up among deer. What ensues is a luminous encounter between civilization and nature, as enacted by a poet who once cataloged the treacheries of love and a boy who slowly learns how to give it.

    "A work of unusual intelligence and imagination, full of surprising images and insights...One of those rare books you end up underlining and copying out into notebooks and reading out loud to friends."--The New York Times Book Review
    David Malouf is the author of eleven novels, as well as bountiful collections of stories, poetry, and opera libretti. He has won the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, the Commonwealth Writers' Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Award, the Prix Femina Étranger, and the Australia-Asia Literary Award; he has also been short-listed for the Man Booker Prize. David Malouf died in 2026. View titles by David Malouf

    About

    In the first century A.D., Publius Ovidius Naso, the most urbane and irreverent poet of imperial Rome, was banished to a remote village on the edge of the Black Sea. From these sparse facts, Malouf has fashioned an audacious and supremely moving novel. Marooned on the edge of the known world, exiled from his native tongue, Ovid depends on the kindness of barbarians who impale their dead and converse with the spirit world.Then he becomes the guardian of a still more savage creature, a feral child who has grown up among deer. What ensues is a luminous encounter between civilization and nature, as enacted by a poet who once cataloged the treacheries of love and a boy who slowly learns how to give it.

    "A work of unusual intelligence and imagination, full of surprising images and insights...One of those rare books you end up underlining and copying out into notebooks and reading out loud to friends."--The New York Times Book Review

    Author

    David Malouf is the author of eleven novels, as well as bountiful collections of stories, poetry, and opera libretti. He has won the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, the Commonwealth Writers' Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Award, the Prix Femina Étranger, and the Australia-Asia Literary Award; he has also been short-listed for the Man Booker Prize. David Malouf died in 2026. View titles by David Malouf

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