Awards

• Winner of NSW Premier's Literary Awards, Christina Stead Prize for fiction 1990 (Australia)

Overview

A woman becomes obsessed with the story of a long-dead colonial pioneer, and her research becomes a way of coming to terms with her own past. Researching in the archives Belle discovers the long-dead Gaden Lockyer, a colonial pioneer in Jericho Flats, and soon becomes obsessed. Belle's quest for Lockyer is her way of coming to terms with the past - her mother, 'a drummer in her own all-women's group'; her absent American father; and her ineffectual husband, Seb. In Reaching Tin River, Thea Astley's satire is at its sharpest and most entertaining.

Full Product Details

9781925603552

Table of Contents

Reviews

`Intelligent, fresh, and new.' * Kirkus Reviews * `Dazzling imagery on every page...Beautifully written.' * Publishers Weekly *

‘Dazzling imagery on every page…Beautifully written.’ * Publishers Weekly * ‘Intelligent, fresh, and new.’ * Kirkus Reviews * ‘How lucidly Ms. Astley evokes for us Australia's rough pioneer history and Belle's love for it…You will like this journey, I promise, and when it is over you will wish it weren't, and you will feel cross and want from Ms. Astley much, much more.’ * New York Times *

Author Information

Thea Beatrice May Astley was born in Brisbane in 1925. In 1958 Astley's first novel, Girl with a Monkey, was published. Over the next four decades she published a work of fiction every few years. Her novels and short stories are distinguished by vivid imagery and metaphor; a complex, ironic style; and a desire to highlight oppression and social injustice. Astley won the Miles Franklin Literary Award for The Well Dressed Explorer (1962), her third novel. Many notable books followed, among them the groundbreaking A Kindness Cup (1974), which addressed frontier massacres of Indigenous Australians, and It's Raining in Mango (1987). Astley won the 1989 Patrick White Award and became an Officer in the Order of Australia in 1992. Her last novel was Drylands (1999), her fourth Miles Franklin winner and first since 1972. A lifelong chain-smoker famed for her sharp wit, Thea Astley died in 2004. She remains one of the most distinctive and influential Australian novelists of the twentieth century.

Tab Content 6

Customer Reviews

Recent Reviews

Countries Available