Happy Valley is a place of dreams and secrets, of snow and ice and wind. In this remote little town, perched in its landscape of desolate beauty, everybody has a story to tell about loss and longing and loneliness, about their passion to escape. I must get away, thinks Dr. Oliver Halliday, thinks Alys Browne, thinks Sidney Furlow. But Happy Valley is not a place that can be easily left, and White's vivid characters, with their distinctive voices, move bit by bit towards sorrow and acceptance.Happy Valley is Patrick White's first novel. It was published in 1939 when he was just twenty-seven. This restless and jagged study of small-town life is a prolonged glimpse of literary genius in the making. White never allowed it to be republished in his lifetime, and the novel has been until now the missing piece in the extraordinary jigsaw of White's work.