Description

FROM THE WOMEN’S PRIZE-WINNING, BOOKER-SHORTLISTED AUTHOR

‘One of Australia’s finest writers’ Daily Telegraph
‘Grenville inhabits characters with a rare completeness’ Jay Parini

‘I stood there holding the hundred-year-old letter with a feeling that was familiar from other archives, other bulging files of dog-eared paper. It was a blood-running-fast, itchy-palm, eyes-wide-open feeling of stumbling on something. A story . . .’

Rummaging around in the Archives one afternoon, Kate Grenville comes across an innocuous-looking file of letters about a schoolteacher in New South Wales. Intrigued, she keeps reading – and discovers a tale far more curious and complex than she ever could have imagined. Contradictory perspectives on Joseph Connor are everywhere, and many of them eerily sinister. Was he savagely beating the students in his care? Or was he the victim of a small-town vendetta? And what went so terribly wrong between him and his daughter?

Grenville simply has to know: was Connor a victim, or a villain? Part colonial cold case, part dance of a writer’s imagination, The Country Schoolmaster is a book like no other. In it, the novelist comes to understand the seductive pleasure of story-making, but also its dangerous limitations.

Publisher Review

Impressive . . . what is most exciting about the book is not our encountering Grenville’s writerly mind, but entering her astute and perceptive readerly one. It will intrigue readers who enjoy the slippery archival investigations of Annie Ernaux and WG Sebald * * Books+Publishing * * Praise for Kate Grenville: Beautifully written, insistently eloquent and expressive of connection . . . [a] stunning literary achievement * * Guardian * * Kate Grenville spins a delicately teasing novel about the inherent untrustworthiness of the official record . . . beautiful and subtle * * Financial Times * * Vivid and memorable . . . [Kate Grenville] offers us the ambivalence and complex textures of experience without losing the rhythm and pace of realist fiction — SARAH MOSS A deft historical tale of discovery . . . The lasting impression of her novel is not of drama, but of a lovely, watchful stillness: a sort of astronomy of the human heart * * Sunday Telegraph * * A fast, enthralling read * * Irish Times * * Sumptuous . . . Brilliantly atmospheric * * Independent on Sunday * * Grenville inhabits characters with a rare completeness . . . [and] writes with a poet’s sense of rhythm and imagery — JAY PARINI An original, inviting tale * * Daily Telegraph * * Fiercely intelligent * * Times Literary Supplement * *