Overview

Winner of the Writers' Guild Best Fiction Book Award, 1996 The year is 1788, the place New South Wales. Marine Lieutenant William Dawes has arrived in the Antipodes to build an observatory, reform the convicts and understand the Aborigines. He is a good man who will be subject to many temptations. In England, now, a child is born. His mother knows he has extraordinary powers; his father knows he is a helpless cripple. Olla, defending and nurturing her miraculous son, emerges as one of the strangest and most compelling characters of contemporary fiction. Jane Rogers intertwines the powerful dramas of the first year of the convict-colony with these present-day lives to make a rich and gripping novel.

Full Product Details

9780349113227

Table of Contents

Reviews

Ambitiously conceived and brilliantly realized THE TIMES Sublime ... A haunting and passionate novel, beautifully related, with some of the best passages of descriptive writing I have read for a long time INDEPENDENT Compelling, elegantly written, acutely intelligent and thoughtful TIME OUT One of Jane Roger's many strengths as a literary novelist is her ability to blend fact and fiction entertainingly and almost seamlessly...a distinctive, dynamic work that explores the nature of all types of exile. GOOD HOUSEKEEPING

Ambitiously conceived and brilliantly realized - THE TIMES Sublime ... A haunting and passionate novel, beautifully related, with some of the best passages of descriptive writing I have read for a long time - INDEPENDENT Compelling, elegantly written, acutely intelligent and thoughtful - TIME OUT One of Jane Roger's many strengths as a literary novelist is her ability to blend fact and fiction entertainingly and almost seamlessly...a distinctive, dynamic work that explores the nature of all types of exile. - GOOD HOUSEKEEPING

Following a popular trend, Rogers's latest (after Her Living Image, 1986, etc.) fuses the past and the present, reaching from the 18th-century founding of a British colony in Australia to a failing 20th-century English marriage, and conjoining the roles of two idealists, each disillusioned in his own time and place. When William Dawes lands in Australia as a young lieutenant in the British colonial force, he aims only to set up an observatory and carry out his assigned astronomer's duties. The difficulties of taming the wilderness and overseeing the cargo of convicts who are the first colonists, however, soon have him otherwise employed, and only in his spare time does he pursue his dream. His latter-day chronicler, Stephen Beech, similarly taxed by pursuing an idealistic mission in education amid the harsh realities of the British school system, has retreated to his research and writing. William's drive gets the observatory built, but his principles set him up for a series of falls, first with a female convict he befriends, then with another convict he has protected, only to have the man deliberately infect the natives with smallpox, to catastrophic effect. Finally, forced to go on a hunt for innocent natives who will be killed in retribution for the murder of a pederast who'd been in the favor of the colony's governor, William decides he's had enough and heads home. Stephen, having chosen a working-class wife and tried to be her Pygmalion, with her resentment and a deformed infant the only results, eventually packs it in too, going off to Australia in search of his subject - and himself. Ambitious and solidly researched, but the different centuries and their challenges remain largely in separate orbits, with only a huge effort at contrivance pulling them parallel, and then only briefly. (Kirkus Reviews)

The author of Mr Wroe's Virgins returns with a novel within a novel, an astonishing historical re-creation of the colonization of Australia by the First Fleet in 1788. The fictionalized life of one Lieutenant William Dawes is skilfully interwoven with the life and inner self-doubts of the novel's author, Stephen; the novel's torturous gestation reflects the birth and early infancy of Stephen and Olla's brain-damaged child, Daniel. As William Dawes struggles to reconcile his Christian principles with the practical necessities of bringing order to a settlement of unruly convicts under the aegis of an irreligious Governor, so Stephen tries to restore order to his crumbling life by imposing idealized theories on Olla, whose only passion is for Daniel. Rogers's beautiful, accomplished and impeccably researched novel interweaves strands from the past and the present to expose the ageless gulf between men's expectations and women's experience, between ideals and the brutality of real life. (Kirkus UK)

One of Jane Roger's many strengths as a literary novelist is her ability to blend fact and fiction entertainingly and almost seamlessly...a distinctive, dynamic work that explores the nature of all types of exile. * GOOD HOUSEKEEPING * Compelling, elegantly written, acutely intelligent and thoughtful * TIME OUT * Sublime ... A haunting and passionate novel, beautifully related, with some of the best passages of descriptive writing I have read for a long time * INDEPENDENT * Ambitiously conceived and brilliantly realized * THE TIMES *

Ambitiously conceived and brilliantly realized - THE TIMES Sublime ... A haunting and passionate novel, beautifully related, with some of the best passages of descriptive writing I have read for a long time - INDEPENDENT Compelling, elegantly written, acutely intelligent and thoughtful - TIME OUT One of Jane Roger's many strengths as a literary novelist is her ability to blend fact and fiction entertainingly and almost seamlessly...a distinctive, dynamic work that explores the nature of all types of exile. - GOOD HOUSEKEEPING

Author Information

Jane Rogers has written six novels including Mr Wroe's Virgins (dramatised as an award-winning television serial) and Promised Lands, which won the Writers' Guild Best Novel Award 1996. She also writes for TV and radio, and teaches at Sheffield Hallam University. Her most recent novel, ISLAND, was published by Abacus in 1999.

Tab Content 6

Customer Reviews

Recent Reviews

Countries Available