Joan Makes History Kate Grenville 1988

Dustjacket synopsis:
"Kate Grenville's wonderfully irreverent new novel rewrites Australia's history from the standpoint of a woman who has never rated a mention in the school books. Joan leads many lives: she is a wife and mother of no great distinction, but in the life of her imagination she is present at all the big moments of Australia's past."

Quotes:
"It has been a man's world, and it has been a man's history - until now...The culture is richer for this ingenious and inspirational chronicle." - Dale Spender, Herald
"Kate Grenville is a writer who knows about those things which belong to eternity." - Manning Clark, Australian Book Review
"Very few recent novels have the audacity and range of Joan Makes History." - Bruce Bennett, The Australian
"An imaginatively crafted novel, effortlessly fluid. Kate Grenville understands the comic poetry of suffering." -Thea Astley. "A writer of quite extraordinary talent, slipping between the centuries with a fluid and vigorous prose style." - Literary Review
"Like Woolf and Weldon, Kate Grenville is expert at bringing to light facets of female experience that usually remain ignored or denied, but she has a sexiness and a generosity all her own." - New Yorker

First Paragraph

My conception: It was not night, no, Eurpoeans have no shame and do not trouble to wait until dark for lust. It was the middle of a hot afternoon in the first year of the century, with the sun blazing down outside on the planks steaming and adding their salt dampness to air that was already too thick to breathe. It was afternoon, and the rhythm of a thin woman and a thick balding man was attuned, after so many months, to the restless rocking and shifting of the boat under the mattress - oh, that mattress and its manifold rustlings! - on which they coupled.

From the UQP paperback edition, 1988.

This page and its contents are copyright © 2002 by Perry Middlemiss, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia.

Last modified: May 2, 2002.