Patrick White's final novel is among his strangest.

Published when he was in his seventies, Memoirs of Many in One dispenses with conventional autobiography in favour of a hallucinatory meditation on memory, identity and old age. Its narrator, Alex Xenophon Demirjian Gray, drifts between recollection, fantasy and inherited history as the novel moves through twentieth-century Australia, Greece and the eastern Mediterranean, blurring the line between personal memory and collective experience. White writes here with remarkable freedom, unconcerned with realism or tidy chronology, allowing voices, histories and selves to overlap until the singular "I" begins to dissolve.

This is one of White's most experimental works, and perhaps one of his least read. It lacks the monumental scale of Voss or The Tree of Man, but possesses a concentrated, late-style intensity that feels closer to Beckett than to traditional historical fiction. For readers interested in fragmented narration, exile, cultural inheritance and the instability of memory, Memoirs of Many in One remains an overlooked and quietly extraordinary novel.

Penguin Books paperback edition, 1987, following the Jonathan Cape first edition of 1986. Very good condition with light shelf wear, a soft crease to the wraps and gentle age toning. Binding remains firm and the pages are clean throughout.