Grenville opens the door and invites the reader into her writing room, and tells us about how this novel was formed, the research she did, the false starts she made and the frustrations she experienced. Slowly she begins to realise she must write about him, and begins to discover what kind of book she will write. Increasingly obsessed with his story, Grenville pursues him from Sydney to London and back, and then up the Hawkesbury itself. It all begins with her ancestor Solomon Wiseman, transported to New South Wales for the term of his natural life, but who later became a wealthy man and built his colonial mansion on the Hawkesbury. Aboriginal people already live there and other newly arrived settlers are finding their own ways to respond to them. Searching for the Secret River is the extraordinary story of how Kate Grenville came to write her award-winning novel. And other recent arrivals - Thomas Blackwood, Smasher Sullivan, and Mrs Herring - are finding their own ways to. Grenville had taken the novel to the frontier of European settlement and written a profoundly original and disturbing work about what happened there. Aboriginal people already live on that river. And they recognised that this simple tale of a poor convict family settling on the banks of the Hawkesbury River in the early nineteenth century represented a landmark moment in Australian fiction. Shortlisted for the Booker Prize and awarded the Commonwealth Writer's Prize, the story of William Thornhill and his journey from London to the other side of the world has moved and exhilarated hundreds of thousands of readers. 'It all begins with her ancestor Solomon Wiseman, transported to New South Wales for the term of his natural life, who later became a wealthy man and built his colonial mansion on the Hawkesbury. Kate Grenville's The Secret River was one of the most loved novels of 2006. Readers marvelled at the subtlety of its language, and the power of Grenville's story-telling. ' Searching for the Secret River is the extraordinary story of how Kate Grenville came to write her award-winning novel, The Secret River. Kate Grenville's novel The Secret River moved and exhilarated many people when it was first published in 2005. Searching for the Secret River is a great book about the writing of a great novel.

Searching for the secret river