Winner of the Australian Book Industry Awards, General Fiction Book of the Year and shortlisted for the Prime Minister's Literary Award for Fiction, 2012.
This is the story of Sarah Thornhill, youngest child of the family at the heart of Kate Grenville's multi-award-winning novel The Secret River.
Her stepmother calls her wilful, but handsome Jack Langland loves her and she loves him. Me and Jack, she thinks, what could 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.
Sarah Thornhill, a novel by one of our greatest writers, is about 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
Kate Grenville is one of Australia's most celebrated writers. Her bestselling novels, which have won many awards and have been published around the world, include The Secret River (shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize), Lilian's Story, The Idea of Perfection and The Lieutenant.
'Sarah Thornhill is the book of a writer of the first rank and there are plenty of things in it that are powerfully realised and that touch the heart...she is a gift of a writer...a haunting performance.' Age
'A beguiling love story...The voice of illiterate Sarah, in which the whole story is told, is Grenville’s great triumph…The book is a moving double love story - of a wild, romantic love and a slower, more mature, developing variety - an imaginatively convincing recreation of history and a celebration of country tenderly and beautifully observed, but above all it is a powerful plea for due acknowledgement and remembrance of the veils of the past...We may not be able to change the actions of the past the gave us this country, Grenville says through charismatic Sarah Thornhill, but if we are not at least mindful of them we are no better than fools or accomplices.' Adelaide Advertiser
'Sarah Thornhill is a beautifully told story of early Australia and the triumphs and struggles of its convicts, free settlers and aborigines.' Australian Women's Weekly
'Grenville's vivid fiction performs as testimony, memory and mourning, within this collective, post-colonial narrative.' Weekend Australian
