The Secret River

A life of petty crime and poverty on the streets of 19th-century London sentences William Thornhill―along with his wife and children―to exile in the colonial outpost of Australia. But among the convicts of New South Wales there is a whisper of the possibility of freedom, away from Sydney and up the Hawkesbury River, for those who dare to stake a claim.
In a richly layered epic that recalls such international modern classics as The True History of the Kelly Gang, Kate Grenville tells the heart- renching story of a family in exile. Sweeping across the 19th century, from the teeming banks of the Thames in London to the hardscrabble frontier settlement of Sydney, Australia, The Secret River sets us down in an unforgiving land and masterfully confronts us with the brutal price of colonization.

Literature & Fiction

GRENVILLE, KATE

Contemporary

Harper-perennial

Harpercollins

Madness, cruelty, and sexuality permeate the household in which Lilian Una Singer is raised-an upper-crust Victorian world of teacups and servants. But Lilian, shielded by layers of fat, an iron will, and an indomitable spirit, has her sights set on an education, love, and-finally-her own transcendent forms of independence.

Lilian's Story

Penguin??Books

Harley Savage is a plain woman, a part-time museum curator and quilting expert with three failed marriages and a heart condition. Douglas Cheeseman is a shy, gawky engineer with jug-handle ears, one marriage gone sour, and a crippling lack of physical courage. They meet in the little Australian town of Karakarook, where Harley has arrived to help the town build a heritage museum and Douglas to demolish the quaint old Bent Bridge. From the beginning they are on a collision course until the unexpected sets them both free. Elegantly and compassionately told, The Idea of Perfection is reminiscent of the work of Carol Shields and Annie Proulx and reveals Kate Grenville as "a writer of extraordinary talent" (The New York Times Book Review).

The Idea of Perfection

British & Irish

Penguin Publishing Group

Albion's Story

Albion Gidley Singer: well schooled in upper-class Sydney, inheritor of his father's lucrative stationery goods business. An awkward lad, no good at the social games expected of him, he hides behind an assemblage of facts that he trots out, at length, to anyone who will listen. Traumatized by the repugnancies of the world - hunger, poverty, the "underworld" of women - Albion barely manages to stomach the rituals that accompany initiation into manhood. And so, with scientific precision, he searches for a proper mate. He does not agonize over his choice, for he knows that in essence women are all the same, "nearly as interchangeable as the bricks in a wall." Childbirth - that mysterious, unpleasant business - soon follows. His firstborn is Lilian, who proves to be the cruelest of jokes: "Nature had dealt Lilian a nasty blow in making her a female, but I was not going to be cheated of her. She was a chip off the old block in every respect but one, and I was going to make sure that one flaw did not spoil the rest of her." As Lilian matures into a huge, inquiring, iron-willed young woman, "a piglet in a lace nightdress," her gender calls into question Albion's own sense of self, and the ongoing power struggle between father and daughter exacts a stiff toll on both of them.

Harcourt

Lilian's Story (Harvest Book)

Houghton/Mifflin

In this "startling, fasciniating, disturbing" (Library Journal) companion to Lilian's Story, Kate Grenville takes on a daunting challenge: to imagine, from the inside out, how an apparently respectable Victorian gentleman can persuade himself that he has a right, perhaps even a "manly" duty to rape any woman under his control: his shopgirls, his servants, his wife, even his daughter.

Greenville, Kate

Women's Fiction

Set in Sydney at the end of the 19th century, this novel focuses on the rise and fall of one man: Albion. He is a hateful and cruel man and a misogynist, but the author also shows him as a victim of his class, period and gender.

Dark Places

Trans-Atlantic Pubns

Literary

Picador

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Books by GRENVILLE, KATE

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by GRENVILLE, KATE. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Secret River

The Secret River

Lilian's Story

The Idea of Perfection

Albion's Story

Lilian's Story (Harvest Book)

Albion's Story

Dark Places

The Idea of Perfection

The Idea of Perfection