Product Description

Harley Savage is a large, rawboned, plain person with a ragged haircut and a white t-shirt coming unstitched along the shoulder. Douglas Cheeseman is a big-eared man who avoids his own reflection, and has bored his wife into leaving him. They are not the usual suspects for a burgeoning romance.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #23928 in Books
• Published on: 2002-03-08
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 416 pages

Customer Reviews

A subtle and beautiful account of ordinary frail people
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.

hot!
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!

a rich and textured read
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.