Sarah Thornhill | |
Author: | Kate Grenville |
Country: | Australia |
Language: | English |
Genre: | novel |
Publisher: | Text Publishing, Australia |
Release Date: | 2011 |
Media Type: | Print (Hardback and Paperback) |
Pages: | 307 |
Isbn: | 9781921758621 |
Preceded By: | The Lieutenant |
Followed By: | A Room Made of Leaves |
Sarah Thornhill (2011) is a novel by Australian author Kate Grenville.[1] It is the sequel to the author's 2005 novel The Secret River.
It won the 2012 Australian Book Industry Awards (ABIA) — Australian General Fiction Book of the Year,[2] and was shortlisted for the 2012 Prime Minister's Literary Awards.
Sarah Thornhill is the last child born to William and Sal Thornhill, whose struggle to establish a new life in Australia was told in the author's novel The Secret River. Sarah's mother is now dead and her father has re-married, who attempts to conceal and overcome her husband's convict past. But Sarah has a will of her own and falls in love with Jack Langland, a "half darkie", the product of a white father and an Aboriginal mother.
Belinda McKeon in The Guardian noted: "It is with often marvellous vividness and clarity that Grenville evokes Sarah's world, from childhood on the Hawkesbury, through an adolescence of idealistic love, to a marriage towards which she goes with a resigned heart but of which she ultimately makes a fine hand."[3]
Delia Falconer in The Monthly found that "Like its predecessors, Sarah Thornhill will be welcomed by many readers as just the story we need now; others may prefer a less comforting, more ambiguous version of the past."[4]