Is it possible to fall in love with a correspondent based entirely on a fascination with his or her handwriting, with a map of the country they live in, with the syllables of their name? What about, then, a fictional character, in a book about a country one has never, and will never, visit?

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 Alföld 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.