Inland is a compact story or group of stories, each nested within another nonetheless opening onto a seemingly endless fractal geography, where the interior of Australia, the Midwestern prairie, and the Hungarian Alf ld merge, imitate, and enfold one another in the mind of a man sitting alone in a room full of books. Perhaps the greatest novel by Gerald Murnane, Australia s reply to Proust and Calvino, and a Nobel favorite for several years running, Inland shows that one can as easily be an exile in one s own interior as out in the wide world, and as easily feel the loss of people one has only imagined as those who have shared our lives in the flesh.