A mesmerising reconstruction of a hundred-year-old true story Kate Grenville discovered in the archives
'I stood there holding the hundred-year-old letter with a feeling that was familiar from other archives, other bulging files of dog-eared paper. It was a blood-running-fast, itchy-palm, eyes-wide-open feeling of stumbling on something. A story ...'
Rummaging around in the archives one afternoon, Kate Grenville comes across an innocuous-looking file full of letters about a schoolteacher in country New South Wales. Intrigued, she keeps reading - and discovers a tale far more curious and complex than first appears. Was Joseph Connor savagely beating the students in his care? Or was he the victim of a small-town vendetta? And what went so terribly wrong between him and his daughter?
Ultimately, Grenville simply has to know: was Connor a victim or a villain? Part colonial cold case, part locked-room mystery, part the dance of a writer's imagination among facts and semi-facts, The Country Schoolmaster is a book like no other. In it, the novelist comes to understand the seductive pleasure of story-making, but also its dangerous limitations.
'A genre-crossing work that examines the temptations and dangers of storytelling. The book is as much about the limits, comforts and seductions of constructing narratives as it is about creating a portrait of a man known only through letters.' -Books+Publishing
Format: Paperback / softback
Pages: 288
Imprint: Black Inc
Supplier: Penguin Random House Distribution
Subjects: Code HBJM (scheme 12), Code NHM (scheme 93), Historical true crime; Colonial education; 19th century Australia; Australian literature; Schoolteacher history; Writer's process; Biographical investigation; Cold case; Historical mystery; Archival research; Colonial Australia; New South Wales history; country New South Wales; colonial history
