Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
A subtle and beautiful account of ordinary frail people, 11 Oct 2001
By A Customer
This book starts as languidly as the weather in NSW, and one can almost feel the heat coming out of the pages. The hurts and shattered dreams of two outsiders to a small town are delicately unfurled, and throughout there is a sense of how fragile human emotions are and how easy it is to pretend that life is safer alone, without intimacy. Yet how those yearnings never let us alone. A beautiful exploration of loss and hope.
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11 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
hot!, 8 Dec 2002
This is a gorgeous book. The searing heat of Australia can be felt in every page and everything just moves slowly to accommodate it. The two main characters are beautifully drawn and the conclusion well-paced and exactly as you would want it to be. Better than perfection? Definitely!
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11 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
a rich and textured read, 31 Jul 2001
This book is a deftly constructed piece and a pleasure to read. Grenville takes the time to illuminate her characters her characters and their environment so that as you read the book you are in a small country town in rural NSW Australia, you feel the heat and flies. You can smell the dust on the road and feel the relief of the shade. By the end of the book you know some of those small town 'characters' that so often lie flat on the page as cliches. The novel also works at a symbolic level with the juxtaposition of the Bank manager's wife to the main characters. And there is a scene where the protagonist swims in the river that is just wonderful and reminds me of the scene in the 'Piano' where the piano sinks in the ocean. I can see why this book won the Orange prize. This book is every bit as good as anything by Dawn Powell or Patrick Hamilton who also create wonderful character studies.
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