Lost to the world for more than four decades, A Season on Earth is the essential link between two acknowledged masterpieces by Gerald Murnane: his debut novel, Tamarisk Row, a lyrical account of boyhood, and the revolutionary prose of The Plains. A hilarious tale of a lustful teenager in 1950s Melbourne, A Lifetime on Clouds has been considered an outlier in Murnane's fiction. That is because, as Murnane writes...