Bendigo, Victoria, in the late 1940s. Or rather Bassett, the fictional country town Gerald Murnane created from memories of his own childhood. Here, nine-year-old Clement Killeaton grows up in a world shaped by Catholicism, his father's gambling obsession, schoolyard cruelties and the mysterious attractions of adulthood.

While his father pursues elusive fortunes at the racetrack, Clement constructs an elaborate imaginary universe of horses, races and distant landscapes. The dusty backyard of his family home becomes a miniature continent, its boundaries extending far beyond the provincial town in which he lives.

First published in 1974, Tamarisk Row is the extraordinary debut of one of Australia's most singular writers. Rather than offering a conventional coming-of-age story, Murnane explores the peculiar ways in which geography, memory and imagination become entangled.

Bendigo is both the novel's geographical inspiration and its point of departure. Its streets, modest houses and surrounding countryside provide the material from which Clement constructs entire alternative worlds. In Murnane's fiction, the seemingly uneventful life of a provincial town contains an almost limitless imaginative territory.

A novel about growing up in regional Australia, but also about the invisible landscapes we carry within ourselves — and the strange possibility that imagined places might be more enduring than real ones.