A Room Made of Leaves

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K: Yes. The wonderful thing now is that indigenous writers of course are beginning to tell those stories with an indigenous voice and that is fantastic because someone like me, well I feel that I can really only write about the white version of that story, that’s the story that I feel kind of entitled to tell. So one of the ways that I’m telling it in A Room Made of Leaves is not so much to talk about the events but to talk about the stories about the events and to try and take them apart. But I did also want to go further than I had gone in The Secret River in giving proper individual characterisation to some indigenous, particularly the women.

Also the shadow of land theft still is cast long and is continuing to be long overdue for a resolution. A beautiful, intimate portrait of a woman who history has left mostly in mystery, in the shadow of her husband. Well, sir, I can pray, and I can live in hope and expectation. But for the time being it is just me and a wilful girl with no looks and no portion either.At the service I kept twisting around, waiting for Father to come in the door and sit down with us. Mother liked to tell the story, laughing in a bitter way, about me twisting and wriggling, running to the door, looking down the lane calling out for him. No one could quieten you, she’d say. Father! Father! you shouted till Mr Bond had to take you out. I could not bear it, the noise of you, and of course I wanted him to come up the lane too, every time you called Father! it was a knife in my heart. Australian author Kate Grenville has always been fascinated by women’s hidden stories. Photograph: Darren James If you’ve been joining in with our #ReadingWomen challenge, you’ll have read Kate Grenville’s incredible Women’s Prize for Fiction winner The Idea of Perfection, and you’ll be as excited as we are about Kate’s brand new novel. A Room Made of Leaves publishes this week, and here’s Kate herself on the inspirations and research that went into her beguiling new book. This is a moving account of the brutal collision between two cultures; but it is the vivid evocation of the harshly beautiful landscape that is the novel's outstanding achievement' 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.

Mr Kingdon must have tried to offer some kind of irritating comfort, in which a reverend like him was well practised, because there was a sharp edge when she answered.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. Kate Grenville has transformed the Australian myth into a dazzling fiction of universal appeal. It is a pleasure to be able to praise a true novelist'

Elizabeth’s friendship with astronomer William Dawes is the central relationship. Grenville’s 2008 novel The Lieutenant was loosely based on Dawes, and she was inspired to write this imaginary memoir after reading Elizabeth’s passing reference to Dawes in an actual letter describing her astronomy lessons with the scientist and naval officer: “I blush at my error”. I composed a glorious romance about all this for my mother. I would not lie, not outright. I set myself a more interesting path: to make sure that my lies occupied the same space as the truth. At first I was intrigued, then I was enthralled, and by the end I felt as though Elizabeth had been a flesh-and-blood friend. Her story makes for a powerful interrogation of femininity, patriarchy, and colliding cultures. Grenville dedicates the book “to all those whose stories have been silenced”, and it speaks to those gaps in the archive–a stunning work of historical fiction for the #MeToo era.’ This beautifully wrought novel, from the author of The Secret River, tells a story of passion and resilience, giving voice to a woman silenced by history.

The Sydney Morning Herald

She writes of the notoriously difficult John: “He could not be trusted not to destroy our hopes.” Elizabeth believes John is “dangerously unbalanced”. Kate Grenville’s return to the territory of The Secret River is historical fiction turned inside out, a stunning sleight of hand by one of our most original writers. Alone to navigate her own destiny Elizabeth's resilience and probably her farming upbringing won her the respect of those around her with her many improvements and success in farming.