Reaching Tin River Reaching Tin River

Reaching Tin River

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Publisher Description

Tin River is a townlet of terminal attractiveness.

Tin River is a state of mind.

Researching in the archives Belle discovers the long-dead Gaden Lockyer, a colonial pioneer in Jericho Flats, and soon becomes obsessed. Belle’s quest for Lockyer is her way of coming to terms with the past—her mother, ‘a drummer in her own all-women’s group’; her absent American father; and her ineffectual husband, Seb. In Reaching Tin River, Thea Astley’s satire is at its sharpest and most entertaining.

Thea Beatrice May Astley was born in Brisbane in 1925. She attended All Hallows, a Catholic school in Fortitude Valley, before studying arts at the University of Queensland. Astley trained to be a teacher and, on marrying Jack Gregson in 1948, moved to Sydney and worked in a number of schools. The pair had a son, Ed.

In 1958 Astley’s first novel, Girl with a Monkey, was published. Over the next four decades she published a work of fiction every few years. Her novels and short stories are distinguished by vivid imagery and metaphor; a complex, ironic style; and a desire to highlight oppression and social injustice.

Astley won the Miles Franklin Literary Award for The Well Dressed Explorer (1962), her third novel. Many notable books followed, among them the groundbreaking A Kindness Cup (1974), which addressed frontier massacres of Indigenous Australians, and It’s Raining in Mango (1987).

In the late 1960s Astley took up a position at Macquarie University, where she worked until 1980, when she began to write full-time. She and Gregson moved to North Queensland, returning to New South Wales later that decade.

Astley won the 1989 Patrick White Award and became an Officer in the Order of Australia in 1992. Her last novel was Drylands (1999), her fourth Miles Franklin winner and first since 1972.

A lifelong chain-smoker famed for her sharp wit, Thea Astley died in 2004, the year after her husband died. She remains one of the most distinctive and influential Australian novelists of the twentieth century.

‘Dazzling imagery on every page…Beautifully written.’ Publishers Weekly

‘Intelligent, fresh, and new.’ Kirkus Reviews

GENRE
Fiction & Literature
RELEASED
2018
30 April
LANGUAGE
EN
English
LENGTH
272
Pages
PUBLISHER
The Text Publishing Company
SELLER
Text Publishing
SIZE
1.3
MB

More Books by Thea Astley

Drylands Drylands
2018
A Descant for Gossips A Descant for Gossips
2015
The Multiple Effects of Rainshadow The Multiple Effects of Rainshadow
2010
It's Raining in Mango It's Raining in Mango
1989
A Kindness Cup A Kindness Cup
2018
Hunting the Wild Pineapple Hunting the Wild Pineapple
1981