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A Room Made of Leaves

A Room Made of Leaves

RRP: £16.99
Price: £8.495
£8.495 FREE Shipping

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It's a lively tale, told without flourish (completely unlike Devotion by Hannah Kent which I've just finished). It's a pity it fades away at the end. So before I do anything else I just want to congratulate you on creating such a beautiful book. I gave it to my mum and she loved it as well.

Australian history, like most histories, is a bit light-on when it comes to women, because they left so little behind. Even when they were educated enough to write letters or journals, those writings are bland, sedate things, suitable to be shared in any genteel parlour. Women at that time had no choice but to be bland. Without any power over any aspect of their lives, they were obliged to go along with a social and legal system that equated them with children. They might have talked together about what they felt about that destiny, but none of them could risk putting it in writing. With no option but to follow her husband to Australia, she makes the most of the rough conditions, does her best for her children and develops friendships among the settlers and transported convicts of the growing town of Sydney, New South Wales. The discovery scenario is irresistibly believable. This month, a WWII diary was found at a Woolworths in Sydney’s North Shore. In 2011, James Bell’s 1838 account of his journey to Australia was published after being discovered at a market stall. In 2018, Miles Franklin’s final 1954 diary was discovered in an old suitcase.

Grenville is challenging the reader, through the eyes of Elizabeth, to face the harsh reality that success and flourishing can so often be at the expense of others.’ At the centre of A Room Made of Leaves is one of the most toxic issues of our own age: the seductive appeal of false stories. Even Kate Grenville’s author note at the end is a reminder of that. This book may be set in the past, but it’s just as much about the present, where secrets and lies have the dangerous power to shape reality. There are other important, current themes too – certainly around the dispossession and treatment of Aboriginal people, and also the convicts.

Grenville invites the reader to reflect on the complex relationship between truth and falsehood, history and fiction…[A] stunning literary achievement.’ Another book in her fantastic collection of work about early Australian colonial times and it’s at least as good, if not even better, than all the others… Absolutely brilliant.’ A beautiful, intimate portrait of a woman who history has left mostly in mystery, in the shadow of her husband.Bob Mortimer wins 2023 Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction with The Satsuma Complex As in The Secret River, Grenville once again writes of a brutal history of colonisation and resistance. Sensitive to previous suggestions of whitewashing (which she has refuted at length), in A Room Made of Leaves Grenville expresses her gratitude to the Darug Custodian Aboriginal Corporation and the Metropolitan Local Aboriginal Land Council for their assistance in writing the book. Through Grenville’s deft way with words, Elizabeth tells of adapting to Sydney Town, “a dusty ugly angry place, a sad blighted bit of ground on which too many souls trampled out their days dreaming of somewhere else”, living close to convicts, forming new social circles in the barren land, raising children and learning to read her husband’s moods and motives while keeping mum. He is blind to her as a person, but, with hopes of her own, she turns that to her advantage as he plots his rise from British officer to landowner, farmer and wealthy trader. How are we to judge these claims? How may we celebrate Elizabeth’s hard-won self-possession, however knowing or regretful, when it is conditional on the violent dispossession of others? It is a complicated balancing act, and feels somehow unresolved — even in a novel that embraces the idea that fiction’s job is to frame questions in new ways and invite engagement, not answer or settle them. You may also opt to downgrade to Standard Digital, a robust journalistic offering that fulfils many user’s needs. Compare Standard and Premium Digital here.



  • Fruugo ID: 258392218-563234582
  • EAN: 764486781913
  • Sold by: Fruugo

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