Product Description

Shielded from emotional and physical abuse by layers of fat, Lilian struggles to escape a suffocating existence in the home of her tyrannical Victorian father and her elegant but ineffectual mother. Madness, cruelty and sexuality permeate the family's upper-crust Australian world. Lilian Una Singer starts life at the beginning of the twentieth century as the daughter of a prosperous middle-class Australian family. She ends it as a cheerfully eccentric bag-lady living on the streets, quoting Shakespeare. This book traces the progress of her life's journey, and why she made the choices she did. She's a person large in spirit as well as body, who wants to invent her own story, rather than allow it to be invented for her. Life presents her with many obstacles including the sinister advances of her father - but in spite of this she succeeds. Triumphantly, she makes her life her own, savouring every moment with the reminder that 'everything matters'.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #93122 in Books
• Published on: 2007-07-05
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 240 pages

Review
"Kate Grenville has transformed an Australian myth into a dazzling fiction of universal appeal. It is a pleasure to be able to praise a true novelist." Patrick White "Here is someone who can really write." Peter Carey "Lilian's Story... takes you into another world, which is rare." Guardian"

Vogue
This novel is bound for glory: it is original, moving, and
brilliantly convincing.

About the Author
Kate Grenville was born in Sydney, Australia. Her novel The Idea of Perfection won the Orange Prize and became a long-running best-seller. Her other works of fiction have been published to acclaim in Australia and overseas and have won state and national awards. Most recently, The Secret River, also published by Canongate, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize (2006). Kate lives in Sydney with her family.

Customer Reviews

Unique, provocative, and worth a read!
This is an extraordinary book, with a unique central character, Lilian Una Stringer who is also the narrator. Lilian is born to privileged parents in early twentieth century Australia but fails to live up to her father's expectations and eventually suffers his abuse and his devastating fury. Her mother meanwhile wiles away her hours with a stopwatch, timing the ferries that plough across the bay.

As a child, Lilian is an unappealing protagonist to the extent that I found myself wondering why I was bothering to read about her. But there was something compelling about her story and the unusual way in which she told it. She is outrageous, warm, lonely, and, beneath the apparently impregnable exterior, highly sensitive and longing for approbation from her fellow beings. Towards the end of the book I grew more and more fond of her and began worrying about how her days would end.

Kate Grenville's prose is described on the cover as 'breathtaking' - one of the reasons I bought the book as I love beautifully crafted, poetic writing. For the most part this does not fall into that category - some sentences even struck me as clumsy and contrived. Nevertheless the author's use of language is almost as unique as the heroine herself and will appeal to anyone interested in the way language is used and appreciative of an unusual style.

At the early stages of the book I remember thinking that this was only a two-star read. but as I became more and more absorbed my assessment changed to three and finally four stars. It's unusual, provoking, and certainly worth a read. Buy it and give it a try!

liberation takes many forms
For me this is the sort of book which needs to be read over a relatively short period of time. It's not the kind to put down for a couple of weeks then pick up again. The narrator introduces and develops streams of thought throughout the book and it would be easy to lose these threads, and as a result much of the novel's impact.

The narrator, Lilian Una Singer, who is also the central character in the novel, is both frustrating and admirable. To begin with I found as a reader that I wanted her to take charge of doing something about those parts of her life which made her different, and an unhappy misfit. Gradually, however, I began to realise that many of her actions and reactions were quite deliberate, and later on in her life it was these very characteristics which liberated her - a liberation which she took great pleasure in flaunting at a society controlled by petty constraints. She came to relish the effect she had on others, unravelling their sense of what was right and normal. In the end she achieved her own version of immortality.

Lillians Story
This book was very interesting , a very good read, thank you for finding it for me.