Thirteen Australian package tourists set off around the world on the holiday of a lifetime. But as they trawl from country to country, through cities and round ever more obscure museums they find nothing as they expect it, least of all themselves.Homesicknessis an enchanting novel: a wry, witty look at the ways people interact, a catalogue of comic digressions and tantalising information in which the world becomes a museum with no exhibit more bizarre than human nature itself.

Murray Bail was born in Adelaide in 1941, and now lives in Sydney. He is the author of three novels and a book of short stories,The Drover's Wife and Other Stories.Homesickness, his first novel, won the National Book Award for Australian Literature and theMelbourne AgeBook of the Year Award. His subsequent novel,Holden's Performance, won the Vance Palmer Prize for Fiction.Eucalyptus, which was published by Harvill in 1998, was the winner of the 1999 Commonwealth Writers Prize and the Miles Franklin Literary Award.