Sarah Thornhill is the youngest child of William Thornhill, convict-turned-landowner on the Hawkesbury River. Her stepmother calls her willful, but handsome Jack Langland loves her and she loves him. Me and Jack, she thinks, how could it go wrong? But there's an ugly secret in Sarah's family. That secret takes her into the darkness of the past, and across the ocean to the wild coasts of New Zealand. Among the strangers of that other place, she can begin to understand. Kate Grenville takes us back to the early Australia of The Secret River and the Thornhill family. This is Sarah's story. It's a story of love lost and found, tangled histories and how it matters to keep stories alive.
'Grenville inhabits characters with a rare completeness ... She writes with a poet's sense of rhythm and imagery' - Guardian
Author
About Kate Grenville
Kate Grenville was born in Sydney. Her most recent novel, The Idea of Perfection, won the Orange Prize for Fiction and became a long-running bestseller. Her five other works of fiction have won numerous awards. Kate Grenville lives in Sydney with her family.
Quite honestly words fail me when it comes to Kate Grenville’s Secret River. It stands alone. It is exemplary. We are whisked away from England in the company of convicted criminal William Thornhill and his wife, Sal, to a convict colony in Sydney, Australia. It is there that he settles with his family, determined to work the land and make a good life for himself. But he soon comes into conflict with the native Aborigines. It is a treasure this story, told in my opinion by one of the finest writers I have ever read.
