The Lieutenant - Tapa dura

"[The Lieutenant] glows with life: imaginative in its re-creations, respectful of what cannot be imagined, and thoughtful in its interrogation of the past. . . . Grenville's most intellectually sophisticated novel to date." -- Kerryn Goldsworthy

"I'm a shamefully late, and enraptured, discoverer of Kate Grenville, whose The Lieutenant is a supremely good novel. . . . [It] has excited me more than any novel I've read since those of W. G. Sebald." -- Diana Athill

"[The Lieutenant] has a potency and beauty that lingers in both the heart and mind's eye.... Rooke and Tagaran are superbly written, and Grenville conveys not only the sense of true kinship that grows between them, but also the euphoria of connection and understanding between two people from different universes. [The Lieutenant] visits a part of Australian black-white history and finds a true heart of goodness there." -- Lucy Clark

"A particular kind of stillness marks out Grenville's characters as uniquely hers. . . . Between the words and among them, this is a profoundly uplifting novel." -- Katy Guest

"Grenville inhabits characters with a rare completeness . . . and writes with a poet's sense of rhythm and imagery. . . . [She] explores the natural rifts that arise between settlers and native people with a deep understanding of the ambiguities inherent in such conflicts . . . [and] occupies the mind of Rooke with a kind of vivid insistence, and his isolation--and moral dilemmas--become ours." -- Jay Parini

"Grenville's portrait of the obtuse yet engaging Rooke and her descriptions of this strange territory are marvelously evocative. . . . The fragility of the encounters [between Rooke and Tagaran] further heightens the suspense that Grenville so deftly sustains. Tragedy looms, of course, just outside the delicate frame of this elegiac novel, but Grenville allows us to marvel at 'one universe in the act of encountering another' even as we dread the inevitable result."--Anna Mundow, "The Boston Globe"
"[A] richly imagined portrait of a deeply introspective, and quite remarkable, man."--Alison McCulloch, "The New York Times Book Review"
"Exquisite . . . Grenville has created a magnificent work of fiction that encompasses the excitement of adventure, the thrill of discovery, the mysteries of the unknown, the ambiguity of relationships and the ethical and moral dilemma of choosing between duty to country or to mankind."--Corinna Lothar, "The Washington Times"
"A prescriptive plea for cultural understanding [that] draws revelatory connections between emotional empathy and scientific discovery. . . . The crisp prose of "The Lieutenant "[often] approaches poetry . . . [and] compels as a historical novel exploring the sins of Australia's colonial past, an admirable testament to the necessity that the West learn to appreciate rather than condemn the Other. But Grenville's most thrilling achievement is to filter that lesson in social acceptance through the computational consciousness of a man whose head is in the stars."--Bill Marx, "Los Angeles Times"
"What differentiates "The Lieutenant" from "The Secret River" is a surprising and refreshing theme of belonging and connectivity. Present are Grenville's consistent abilities to understand and re-birth history into a contextual narrative, but here those skills coalesce into an overarching message: 'Everything is part of every other thing, now and forever.' . . . Understanding and meaning [can be] foundl

The Commonwealth Writer's-winning author of The Secret River presents a follow-up set in late eighteenth-century New South Wales that finds misfit Daniel hoping to find his place in life when he joins the military, constructs an observatory, and forges a relationship with an Aborigine girl.