The Secret River

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Thornhill its villain, even while he carries its sympathetic weight. Grenville is particularly good on inarticulate love, and Thornhill's relationship with his wife, Sal, civilises him, makes him a good man and ensures that the reader is on his side. As husband, father and hard-working, decent man, he is also the book's hero.

Once freed, Thornhill falls in love with a point of land up the Hawkesbury River with the visceral desire for ownership of someone who has never been allowed to own anything. He dreams of his own hundred acres, of dignity and entitlement. It never crosses his mind, since the land is not settled, that it could already be owned. Grenville writes exactingly and with passion about the Australian landscape: the bright light, the skinny, grey-green trees that refuse to shed their leaves, the cliffs that tumble into the river through snaking mangroves. Thornhill recognises that this is a landscape that can remake a man.

She is also wonderful on the ex-cons ...

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novel since winning the Orange prize five years ago with The Idea of Perfection, is no exception. In chronicling the life of transported felon Will Thornhill, Grenville also charts the early settlement of her native New South Wales, skilfully highlighting the brutality of an enterprise which, half incidentally and half by design, laid waste the land, lives and culture of the region's aboriginal inhabitants.

Thornhill's story begins in late 18th-century London, where he has been born into extreme poverty. The family is too large and too far down the social scale to be able to get along by strictly honest means, and Will, decent at heart but pragmatic in his approach to the business of ...

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