* 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 * 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'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 or once appreciation, sympathy and admiration get the better of impotent guilt. -- Lionel Shriver Daily Telegraph * Grenville lingers carefully over her exposition of Rooke, setting him up as a singular character. This enhances the drama of the book's later pages, in which his sensibilities are so disastrously different to those of his shipmates... Genuinely affecting, her new novel is another capable tranche of character-based, historical fiction and a worthy foil to its predecessor. -- Melissa McClements Financial Times * 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 * Grenville is one of Australia's most popular writers, and this novel is a triumph. Read it at once. The Times * A particular kind of stillness marks Kate Grenville's characters out as uniquely hers ... Between the words and among them, this is a profoundly uplifting novel - one that leaves you understanding Rooke's premise: that "Truth [needs] hundreds of words, or none." Independent * This engrossing story evokes the excitement of discovery and the beauty of an unspoilt land. -- Anthony Gardner Scottish Daily Mail * Grenville masterfully depicts the brutal simplicity of the early settlers' life in New South Wales ... through Rooke's peaceable, curious character, the moral tragedy of the Aboriginal compromise and the cowardice of the collective are neatly wrought. Grenville has stuck to what she knows, but she has done it well. -- Renee Rowland The Skinny * A more overtly political book than Grenville's last, but beautifully wrought. Psychologies * In lucid prose and perfectly measured strides, Grenville lays down her riveting tale. A novel aglow with empathy, its author's capacious visions still deliver an elemental thrill. -- Stephanie Cross Daily Mail * Grenville's novel is much more than just another culture-clash novel. She deftly avoids worthiness by making the idealistic Rooke the heart and soul of her story, making us want to believe that his appreciation of the indigenous Australians will continue and that dark clouds won't gather over this alien paradise. When they do, the novel becomes all the more disquieting, for this story is as much a personal tragedy as it is a cultural one. -- Jonathan Eyers Metro
