The Lieutenant
Kate Grenville
“Daniel Rooke was quiet, moody, a man of few words. He had no memories other than of being an outsider . . . He had no evidence, but doggedly believed that there would one day be a place, somewhere in the world, for the person he was.”
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The bestselling new novel from the author of the Booker-shortlisted The Secret River
This engrossing story evokes the excitement of discovery and the beauty of an unspoilt land. - Anthony Gardner, Scottish Daily Mail
In 1788 Daniel Rooke sets out on a journey that will change the course of his life. As a lieutenant in the First Fleet, he lands on the wild and unknown shores of New South Wales. There he sets up an observatory to chart the stars. But this country will prove far more revelatory than the stars above.
Based on real events, The Lieutenant tells the unforgettable story of Rooke’s connection to an Aboriginal child - a remarkable friendship that resonates across the oceans and the centuries.
“A deft historical tale of discovery … [Dawes’] qualities shine lambently through Grenville’s elegantly calibrated prose … The lasting impression of her novel is not of drama, but of a lovely, watchful stillness: a sort of astronomy of the human heart”
Jane Shilling
sunday Telegraph
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“Grenville inhabits characters with a rare completeness … the reader shares the excitement of his widening consciousness … Grenville writers with a poet’s sense of rhythm and imagery … [and] explores the natural rifts that arise between settlers and native people with a deep understanding of the ambiguities inherent in such conflicts. She occupies the mind of Rooke with a kind of vivid insistence, and his isolation - and moral dilemmas - become ours.”
Jay Parini
guardian
“Grenville is one of Australia’s most popular writers, and this novel is a triumph. Read it at once.”
the Times
“Grenville’s prose is clear and clean, employing a gently leading storytelling style that is especially welcome with a foreign land and a foreign time … Grenville has brought imagination and compassion to the source of so much of Australia’s retroactive hand-wringing. What distinguishes her portrayal of Aboriginal culture is that for once appreciation, sympathy and admiration get the better of impotent guilt.”
Lionel Shriver
daily Telegraph
“A compelling narrative … an intelligent, spare, always engrossing imagining of first contact, in which the fictionalization of history allows a comment about current postcolonial race relationships which escapes the didacticism of special pleading.”
Patrick Denman Flanery
times Literary Supplement
Kate Grenville
Kate Grenville is one of Australia’s best-loved authors. Her works of fiction have won numerous awards both in Australia and internationally. The Idea of Perfection won the 2001 Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction and became a long-running bestseller. In 2006 The Secret River won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. Searching For The Secret River, the story behind that novel, is also available from Canongate, alongside her first novel, Lilian’s Story. Kate Grenville lives in Sydney.
www.kategrenville.com