A Room Made of Leaves by Kate Grenville (Paperback, 2021)

Do not believe too quickly...

What if Elizabeth Macarthur-wife of the notorious John Macarthur, wool baron in early Sydney-had written a shockingly frank secret memoir?

In her introduction Kate Grenville tells, tongue firmly in cheek, of discovering a long-hidden box containing that memoir. What follows is a playful dance of possibilities between the real and the invented.

Grenville's Elizabeth Macarthur is a passionate woman managing her complicated life-marriage to a ruthless bully, the impulses of her own heart, the search for power in a society that gave her none-with spirit, cunning and sly wit.

Her memoir reveals the dark underbelly of the polite world of Jane Austen. It explodes the stereotype of the women of the past- devoted and docile, accepting of their narrow choices. That was their public face-here's what one of them really thought.

At the heart of this book is one of the most toxic issues of our times- the seductive appeal of false stories. Beneath the surface of Elizabeth Macarthur's life and the violent colonial world she navigated are secrets and lies with the dangerous power to shape reality.

A Room Made of Leaves is the internationally acclaimed author Kate Grenville's first novel in almost a decade. It is historical fiction turned inside out, a stunning sleight of hand that gives the past the piercing immediacy of the present.

Format: Paperback | 336 pages

Dimensions (cm): 23.4 x 15.3 x 2.4 | 536g -

Publication Date: 31 Aug 2021

Publisher: The Text Publishing Company

Publication City/Country: Melbourne, Australia

Language: English

ISBN10: 1922458023

ISBN13: 9781922458025

 

Condition: Acceptable

A book with obvious wear. Has some damage to the cover, including minor scuff marks along the edges, and creasing on the bottom-right corner of the front cover, and wrinkling on the front, but integrity still intact. There is wrinkling along the top of the pages in the first three-quarters of the book, possibly caused by water damage, and varying in severity (nothing too bad), but none of which compromises the legibility or understanding of the text. No writing in margins, no underlining and highlighting of text, and no missing pages or anything else that would compromise the legibility or understanding of the text. A worn and slightly wonky, but still a clean, solid, and readable copy.