Kate Grenville in Conversation

Join Kate Grenville, author of The Secret River and one of Australia's most celebrated writers, as she brings her new book The Country Schoolmaster: A Mystery in 88 Letters to the Northern Rivers for this special in conversation event on Monday 12 October at Bangalow A&I Hall.

‘I stood there holding the hundred-year-old letter with a feeling that was familiar from other archives, other bulging files of dog-eared paper. It was a blood-running-fast, itchy-palm, eyes-wide-open feeling of stumbling on something. A story…’

Rummaging around in the archives one afternoon, Kate Grenville comes across an innocuous-looking file full of letters about a schoolteacher in country New South Wales. Intrigued, she keeps reading – and discovers a tale far more curious and complex than first appears. Was Joseph Connor savagely beating the students in his care? Or was he the victim of a small-town vendetta? And what went so terribly wrong between him and his daughter?

Ultimately, Grenville simply has to know: was Connor a victim or a villain? Part colonial cold case, part locked-room mystery, part the dance of a writer's imagination among facts and semi-facts, The Country Schoolmaster is a book like no other. In it, the novelist comes to understand the seductive pleasure of story-making, but also its dangerous limitations.