The Fortunes of Richard Mahony

He had never got within measurable distance of what he called life, at all...deep down in him, he knew, was an enormous residue of vitality...It was like a buried treasure, jealously kept for the event of his one day catching up with life: not the bare scramble for a living that here went by that name, but Life with a capital L.

Richard Mahony is a restless man. Ballarat, England, Melbourne, Europe, the bush: elsewhere is always better.

Searching for a place, a meaning, a life, Mahony and his wife Mary journey from wealth to poverty, order to chaos, sanity to the asylum. The Fortunes of Richard Mahony is a towering novel.