Friday Books: The Secret River

The Secret River by Kate Grenville is a great book, from the first word to the last. It is well written with beautiful language. The story is a grabber, too. It's historical fiction about the early days in Australia, when the first white people were arriving, many of them convicts, and begin settling in an already-occupied land. You know there is inevitable conflict with the native people in this story, and some conflict also within the daily lives of the settlers themselves. (Inevitable only because we already know it happened. It didn't have to happen the way it did, but our hindsight makes it inevitable.)

I learned a lot about how convicts fared in those early days, something I had given surprisingly little thought to until I read this book. I'm very happy I found and read this book. It's an excellent one.