Lilian's Story

Author(s): Kate Grenville

Fiction Contemporary

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 Information

* Lilian's Story ... takes you into another world, which is rare. Guardian * Here is someone who can really write -- Peter Carey * 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

Kate Grenville is one of Australia's best-loved authors. Her works of fiction have won numerous awards both in Australia and internationally. THE IDEA OF PERFECTION won the 2001 Orange Prize for Fiction and became a long-running bestseller. In 2006 THE SECRET RIVER won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. SEARCHING FOR THE SECRET RIVER, the story behind this novel, is also available from Canongate, alongside her first novel LILIAN'S STORY. Kate Grenville lives in Sydney, and maintains a website at www.users.bigpond.com/kgrenville.

General Fields

  • : 9781841959955
  • : Canongate Books Ltd
  • : Canongate Books Ltd
  • : 0.222
  • : July 2007
  • : 198mm X 131mm X 20mm
  • : United Kingdom
  • : books

Special Fields

  • : Kate Grenville
  • : Paperback
  • : 823.914
  • : 288