The making of Martin Sparrow / Peter Cochrane.
Publication details: Melbourne, Vic. : Penguin Random House, 2018.Description: 453 pages ; 24 cmISBN:- 9780670074068
- 0670074063
- Historical fiction
- Ex-convicts -- Fiction
- Farmers -- Fiction
- Floods -- Fiction
- Police -- Fiction
- Frontier and pioneer life -- New South Wales -- Hawkesbury River Region -- Fiction
- Farmers -- New South Wales -- History -- Fiction
- Convicts -- Australia -- Fiction
- Men -- New South Wales -- Fiction
- Australian fiction
- Hawkesbury River Region (N.S.W.) -- History -- Fiction
- Hawkesbury River (N.S.W.) -- History -- 19th century -- Fiction
- New South Wales -- Social life and customs -- 1788-1851 -- Fiction
- New South Wales -- Social conditions -- 1788-1851 -- Fiction
- Australian
- A823.4 23
Item type | Home library | Collection | Call number | Status | Date due | Barcode | Item reserves | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Book | Melbourne Athenaeum Library | Fiction - Historical | COC | Available | 067824 |
"After the flood comes the reckoning"--Cover.
Martin Sparrow is already struggling when the Hawkesbury's great flood of March 1806 lays waste to him and his farm. Luckless, lovelorn and deep in debt, the ex-convict is confronted with a choice. He can buckle down and set about his agricultural recovery, or he can heed the whispers of an earthly paradise on the far side of the mountains - a place where men are truly free - and strike out for a new life. But what chance of renewal is there for a man like Sparrow in either the brutal colony or the forbidding wilderness? The decision he makes triggers a harrowing chain of events and draws in a cast of extraordinary characters, including Alister Mackie, the chief constable on the river; his deputy, Thaddeus Cuff; the vicious hunter, Griffin Pinney; the Romany girl, Bea Faa; and the young Aboriginal men, Caleb and Moowut'tin, caught between war and peace. Set against the awe-inspiring immensity of the hinterland west of the Hawkesbury River, this epic of chance and endurance is an immersion into another time, a masterpiece of language and atmosphere. Rich, raw, strangely beautiful and utterly convincing, The Making of Martin Sparrow reveals Peter Cochrane - already one of our leading historians - as one of our most compelling novelists.