The Schoonermaster's Dance

Sarah Tilber, a Canberra librarian, becomes obsessed with learning about her ancestor Charles Tilber, a schoonermaster. She’s so obsessed that she leaves her job, her husband, and her country in search of traces of this mysterious man. Then she, too, vanishes – apparently somewhere between Chile and Peru. Can her long-suffering friend Jenn find out what happened?


The Schoonermaster’s Dance was first published in 2000. In 2001, it was joint winner of ACT Book of the Year (with Dorothy Johnston’s The Trojan Dog) and joint winner of the Courier Mail Book of the Year (with Peter Carey’s True History of the Kelly Gang).


The blog ANZ Litlovers, reviewing the book in 2020, notes that: ‘This wonderful book is long out of print.’ No longer, thanks to the Untapped Collection.


Alan Gould is an award-winning poet and novelist. His works include To the Burning City (1991 – winner of the NBC Banjo Award for Fiction and also part of the Untapped Collection), The Past Completes Me (2005 – winner of the Grace Leven Poetry Prize), andThe Seagrass Spiral (2012 – joint winner of the Canberra Critics Circle Award for Writing). In 1999, Gould won the Philip Hodgins Memorial Medal.