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A page-turning, epistolary mystery from Women's Prize-winning, Booker-shortlisted author Kate Grenville
'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.
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
A triumph - The Times
A vividly transporting tale . . . The deft, lucid prose of Grenville captures a sense of the simple wonders of communication and the grim impact of colonialism - Metro
A work of history, biography, story and memoir, all fused into a novel that suggests the great potential of literary art as redeemer, healer and pathway to understanding . . . the writing sparkles with Grenville's gift for transcendently clear imagery - Guardian