Searching for the Secret river /

The Secret River was Kate Grenville's tour de force novel, an award-winning international bestseller that was also a finalist for the Man Booker Prize and the Miles Franklin A ward. And yet, this stunningly executed tale began life as a non-fiction book when Grenville embarked on a quest to know her ancestor, Solomon Wiseman, an E nglish convict sent to New South Wales. Wiseman soon morphed into The Secret River's protagonist, William Thornhill.

In Searching for the Secret River, Grenville invites the reader into her writing room to lay bare her creative journey, transforming the dry facts of history into. powerful fiction. She not only reveals the wrong turns and exhilarating breakthroughs of research and writing but also peels back the guilt that overwhelms her after discovering that Wiseman, in true colonial fashion, took land and livelihood from the Australian Aboriginal people. The result is a vivid history of a novel that is, at once, a history of a family and of a country still struggling to reconcile its past and present.