book review a room made of leaves

A Room Made of Leaves

Kate grenville.

352 pages, Hardcover

First published July 2, 2020

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Review: Kate Grenville’s A Room Made of Leaves fills the silence of the archives

Lecturer, School of the Arts & Media, UNSW Sydney

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Kerrie Davies does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

UNSW Sydney provides funding as a member of The Conversation AU.

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Review: A Room Made of Leaves, Text Publishing

Some time ago, during the renovation of a historic house in Sydney, a tin box, sealed with wax and wrapped in oiled canvas, was found wedged under a beam in the roof cavity. The house was Elizabeth Farm…

So begins A Room Made of Leaves ’ editor’s note, detailing the discovery of the “long lost secret memoirs” of Elizabeth Macarthur , wife of colonial wool baron John Macarthur . The “editor and transcriber” is Kate Grenville, author of the acclaimed colonial novel based on her family history, The Secret River .

The discovery scenario is irresistibly believable. This month, a WWII diary was found at a Woolworths in Sydney’s North Shore. In 2011, James Bell’s 1838 account of his journey to Australia was published after being discovered at a market stall. In 2018, Miles Franklin’s final 1954 diary was discovered in an old suitcase.

Elizabeth Macarthur’s actual journal detailing her voyage on the Second Fleet was discovered at her daughter’s home in England, extracts of which were published as Some Early Records of the Macarthurs of Camden in 1914.

Grenville’s imaginary memoir of Elizabeth slips into the space between hoax and history, the paradox of purporting to be true while declaring it is not. Grenville openly plays with memoir’s “ autobiographical pact ”, where the reader unquestionably accepts an autobiography as truth. While a novel requires a suspension of disbelief, Grenville asks the reader to suspend their belief, akin to Peter Carey’s “feat of imposture”, True History of the Kelly Gang .

Read more: True History of the Kelly Gang review: an unheroic portrait of a violent, unhinged, colonial punk

Grenville so convincingly creates Elizabeth’s voice it is easy to forget her opening warning: “Do not believe too quickly!”

Remains unsaid

In Grenville’s telling of Elizabeth’s telling of her marriage to John Macarthur, Elizabeth astutely understands how to manage the patriarchy rather than be a “true helpmate” to her husband as she is introduced in the family history .

She writes of the notoriously difficult John: “He could not be trusted not to destroy our hopes.” Elizabeth believes John is “dangerously unbalanced”.

Through her revision of the Macarthurs’ relationship, Grenville’s imaginary memoir joins the litany of (imaginary and authentic) revisionist biographies of wives overlooked or derided because of their husband’s fame.

Read more: #ThanksforTyping: the women behind famous male writers

Elizabeth’s friendship with astronomer William Dawes is the central relationship. Grenville’s 2008 novel The Lieutenant was loosely based on Dawes, and she was inspired to write this imaginary memoir after reading Elizabeth’s passing reference to Dawes in an actual letter describing her astronomy lessons with the scientist and naval officer: “I blush at my error”.

This blush becomes a motif throughout A Room Made of Leaves: of the true nature of their friendship, and for what remains unsaid. “I blush at my error” was, in Grenville’s eyes, a rare glimpse of Elizabeth’s feelings hidden in what Grenville describes in her editor’s note as otherwise “unrevealing” and “dull” correspondence.

As in The Secret River, Grenville once again writes of a brutal history of colonisation and resistance. Sensitive to previous suggestions of whitewashing (which she has refuted at length ), in A Room Made of Leaves Grenville expresses her gratitude to the Darug Custodian Aboriginal Corporation and the Metropolitan Local Aboriginal Land Council for their assistance in writing the book.

After being told of the Battle of Parramatta led by resistance leader, Pemulwuy , Elizabeth visits the battle site and alludes to dominant colonial accounts:

There was nothing to show what had happened. Only the words of that story, snipped out and pasted onto the air.

Filling the silence

There is historical precedence for reading Elizabeth’s actual letters with the eye for the unsaid. 18th and 19th century women’s life writing was written with the expectation it was not private and adhered to social conventions of behaviour. Self-censorship and “ silences in the archives ” abound.

As Elizabeth, Grenville fills the silences:

I composed a glorious romance about all this for my mother. I would not lie, not outright. I set myself a more interesting path: to make sure that my lies occupied the same space as the truth.

Michelle Scott Tucker’s referenced biography, Elizabeth Macarthur: A Life at the Edge of the World is a tempting companion to come back to reality after reading A Room Made of Leaves. But Grenville’s Elizabeth stays with you.

As you see more curls of truth in Tucker’s biography that appear in Grenville’s imaginary memoir, you wonder about how the real Elizabeth felt — rather than what actually happened.

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Book Review: A Room Made of Leaves by Kate Grenville

“What if Elizabeth Macarthur – wife of the notorious John Macarthur, wool baron in the earliest days of Sydney – had written a shockingly frank secret memoir? And what if novelist Kate Grenville, had miraculously found and published it? That’s the starting point for A Room Made of Leaves, a playful dance of possibilities between the real and the invented. Marriage to a ruthless bully, the impulses of her heart, the search for power in the society that gave women none, this Elizabeth Macarthur manages her complicated life with spirit and passion, cunning and sly wit. Her memoir lets us hear – at last – what one of those seemingly demure women from history might really have thought. At the centre of A Room Made of Leaves is one of the most toxic issues of our own age, the seductive appeal of false stories. This book may be set in the past, but it’s just as much about the present, where secrets and liws have the dangerous power to shape reality”. – from the blurb

My Thoughts

This fictional account of the life of Elizabeth Macarthur seemed very real to me. I would love to believe that the real Elizabeth Macarthur had the spirit and confidence of this fictional version. The story of the life of Elizabeth Macarthur starts at the beginning, in England when young Elizabeth met John Macarthur and how she came to marry the pompous and arrogant man. We followed them during their hellish voyage to Australia, and as they began their life in the new country, that, at first, was far less comfortable than expected.

As is usual for Kate, this book is well researched and very clearly tells the story of life in Sydney, in the very early days of settlement. I very much enjoyed reading about these times through the eyes of a strong female.

Historical fiction is my favourite genre and especially Australia historical fiction. I’ve read Kate Grenville’s books Secret River and The Lieutenant, and have been a fan ever since. This book didn’t disappoint at all. I found it totally engrossing and felt sad when I had read the last page. My opinion is that this wonderful novel is historical fiction at it’s best.

Next on my ‘to be read’ pile is the real biography of Elizabeth Macarthur which I’m keen to read.

Recommendations

‘This story, told through Grenville’s sharp lens, is one that will stay with the reader for a long time.’  – Readings

‘An ingenious tapestry of history and invention, A Room Made of Leaves is a novel of womanhood, motherhood, secrets, lies, obsession, transformation and the loss of innocence. It’s a true pleasure to read Grenville’s writing, and this one’s been well worth the wait!’ – Booktopia

“Grenville’s prose is elegant and meticulously crafted…Despite the trappings of history in A Room Made of Leaves and Grenville’s impressive use of the archive to conjure the novel, her achievement here is not a historical one. A Room Made of Leaves questions,  rhetorically, how to live ethically with a history that is unfair.   – Saturday Paper

  Published in 2020 by Text Publishing Company, Melbourne, Australia Hardcover, 317 pages

My Star Rating ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

About the author.

Kate Grenville is one of Australia’s most celebrated writers. Her international  bestseller The Secret River was awarded local and overseas prizes, has been adapted for the stage and as an acclaimed television miniseries, and is now a much-loved classic. In 2017 Grenville was awarded the Australia Council Award for Lifetime Achievement in Literature. She lives in Melbourne. – kategrenville.com.au

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A Room Made of Leaves by Kate Grenville review – the untold story of an unruly woman

What would Elizabeth Macarthur, wife of notorious Australian colonist John Macarthur, say if she could set the record straight?

This piece is part of a new weekly series of Australian book reviews, funded by Copyright Agency

“D o not believe too quickly!” The epigraph to A Room Made of Leaves issues a warning that resonates throughout the novel, as Kate Grenville invites the reader to reflect on the complex relationship between truth and falsehood, history and fiction.

The phrase is taken from the actual letters of Elizabeth Macarthur, wife of the notorious, corrupt early Australian settler John Macarthur. Grenville believes that these letters, sent from Australia to family and friends in England, present carefully constructed, lady-like fictions designed to both conceal and subtly reveal the truth. Who was she, really, Grenville’s novel asks? How did the demure farmer’s daughter from Devon with no substantial fortune wind up with a man so obsessed with his own status and advancement? And what on earth might it have been like to be married to a sociopath like John Macarthur? If Elizabeth had been able to write her own story, what might it say?

Unruly women and their untold stories have always fascinated Grenville. The same questions that inspired her debut novel, Lilian’s Story (1985), drive this imagined account of Elizabeth Macarthur’s inner life: how did clever girls, “willful” girls as Elizabeth’s mother calls her, deal with the limitations of conventional femininity, faced with choices that Elizabeth remarks in the novel “were no choices”? How did they manage to rewrite the script, to forge their own individual means of escape, to keep their spirits alive?

A Room Made of Leaves brings these questions together with Grenville’s broader project of unsettling conventional narratives of colonial Australia that began with The Secret River (2005), based on research into her own family history. This turns out to be an uneasy coupling, as the novel tries to balance the happy empowerment of Elizabeth, her flourishing against the odds in a hostile environment, with the inescapable knowledge that the conditions of her flourishing depend on the oppression of others.

The novel concludes with Elizabeth’s assertions of her sense of being at home in Australia, scaffolded by her knowledge that the property she loves is stolen Aboriginal land. The terms of her belonging to the place are beautifully written, insistently eloquent and expressive of connection: “I knew every tree and rock … every shape the water took around the bed of the river at every height of the tide,” she writes. “This land … was connected to me now by a thousand filaments of memory.” At the same time, she sees herself as more of a thief than her convict servant who was transported for stealing. Acknowledgment is presented here as the beginning of redemption: “I am prepared to look in the eye what we have done,” she insists, to admit the “hard truth” of colonial theft and wrong-doing.

How are we to judge these claims? How may we celebrate Elizabeth’s hard-won self-possession, however knowing or regretful, when it is conditional on the violent dispossession of others? It is a complicated balancing act, and feels somehow unresolved — even in a novel that embraces the idea that fiction’s job is to frame questions in new ways and invite engagement, not answer or settle them.

But this does not detract from the stunning literary achievement of the novel. The story unfolds in small chapter-fragments, their short paragraphs packed with gorgeous descriptions of the Australian landscape — “a slice of harbor rough and blue like lapis”, a stone overhang “with a fraying underside, soft as cake, that glowed yellow” — and compressed emotional power. The account of young Elizabeth being “disarmed” by the wordless eloquence of John Macarthur as they gaze at one another from opposite ends of a hallway is a revelatory description of the mechanics of desire, blazing with erotic intensity: “We had but seconds, and he knew how to use them,” she remembers. “He put his hand on his heart with a delicate movement, a caress of himself, fingers spread on his coat, and tilted his head questioningly, submissively, yearningly. How much a person can say by nothing more than a tilt of the head!”

Most striking is the way Grenville makes images startlingly fresh that ought to be worn out with use. She turns inside-out the conventional emblem of birdsong as heartfelt expression, making it expressive only of tragic limitation: as a newly married, unhappy wife, Elizabeth hears a bird that sings “a lovely song” at dawn. “But there was no variation,” she observes; it was “trapped in that one sad utterance. … It might have had everything to say of what it was like to be alive in the hour before the sun rose and life began again. But it had only that one phrase. I imagined the bird weeping its frustration, opening its beak to let out all it knew, and hearing again that parody of what it had in its heart.”

This is one of many images that capture the heartbreaking constraints on female utterance. And there is the wonderful image of a determined gull, observed by Elizabeth and her lover at the end of their affair: “Gulls came. We watched as one dived into the water — with such a smack, it must have hurt — missed its prey, wheeled up, smacked down again, staggered into the air.” Inelegant and ridiculous and graceful at once, so perfectly described as bird and so utterly human.

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Review: Kate Grenville's A Room Made of Leaves fills the silence of the archives

The newest novel from the author of The Secret River is an imagined diary, detailing the 'true' story of Elizabeth Macarthur.

Review: A Room Made of Leaves, Text Publishing

Some time ago, during the renovation of a historic house in Sydney, a tin box, sealed with wax and wrapped in oiled canvas, was found wedged under a beam in the roof cavity. The house was Elizabeth Farm…

So begins A Room Made of Leaves ’ editor’s note, detailing the discovery of the “long lost secret memoirs” of Elizabeth Macarthur , wife of colonial wool baron John Macarthur . The “editor and transcriber” is Kate Grenville, author of the acclaimed colonial novel based on her family history, The Secret River .

The discovery scenario is irresistibly believable. This month, a WWII diary was found at a Woolworths in Sydney’s North Shore. In 2011, James Bell’s 1838 account of his journey to Australia was published after being discovered at a market stall. In 2018, Miles Franklin’s final 1954 diary was discovered in an old suitcase.

Elizabeth Macarthur’s actual journal detailing her voyage on the Second Fleet was discovered at her daughter’s home in England, extracts of which were published as Some Early Records of the Macarthurs of Camden in 1914.

Grenville’s imaginary memoir of Elizabeth slips into the space between hoax and history, the paradox of purporting to be true while declaring it is not. Grenville openly plays with memoir’s “ autobiographical pact ”, where the reader unquestionably accepts an autobiography as truth. While a novel requires a suspension of disbelief, Grenville asks the reader to suspend their belief, akin to Peter Carey’s “feat of imposture”, True History of the Kelly Gang .

Grenville so convincingly creates Elizabeth’s voice it is easy to forget her opening warning: “Do not believe too quickly!”

Remains unsaid

In Grenville’s telling of Elizabeth’s telling of her marriage to John Macarthur, Elizabeth astutely understands how to manage the patriarchy rather than be a “true helpmate” to her husband as she is introduced in the family history .

She writes of the notoriously difficult John: “He could not be trusted not to destroy our hopes.” Elizabeth believes John is “dangerously unbalanced”.

Through her revision of the Macarthurs’ relationship, Grenville’s imaginary memoir joins the litany of (imaginary and authentic) revisionist biographies of wives overlooked or derided because of their husband’s fame.

Elizabeth’s friendship with astronomer William Dawes is the central relationship. Grenville’s 2008 novel The Lieutenant was loosely based on Dawes, and she was inspired to write this imaginary memoir after reading Elizabeth’s passing reference to Dawes in an actual letter describing her astronomy lessons with the scientist and naval officer: “I blush at my error”.

This blush becomes a motif throughout A Room Made of Leaves: of the true nature of their friendship, and for what remains unsaid. “I blush at my error” was, in Grenville’s eyes, a rare glimpse of Elizabeth’s feelings hidden in what Grenville describes in her editor’s note as otherwise “unrevealing” and “dull” correspondence.

Reputedly Elizabeth Macarthur, 1785-1790 - watercolour on ivory miniature. Dixson Library, State Library of New South Wales

As in The Secret River, Grenville once again writes of a brutal history of colonisation and resistance. Sensitive to previous suggestions of whitewashing (which she has refuted at length), in A Room Made of Leaves Grenville expresses her gratitude to the Darug Custodian Aboriginal Corporation and the Metropolitan Local Aboriginal Land Council for their assistance in writing the book.

After being told of the Battle of Parramatta led by resistance leader, Pemulwuy , Elizabeth visits the battle site and alludes to dominant colonial accounts:

There was nothing to show what had happened. Only the words of that story, snipped out and pasted onto the air.

Filling the silence

There is historical precedence for reading Elizabeth’s actual letters with the eye for the unsaid. 18th and 19th century women’s life writing was written with the expectation it was not private and adhered to social conventions of behaviour. Self-censorship and “ silences in the archives ” abound.

As Elizabeth, Grenville fills the silences:

I composed a glorious romance about all this for my mother. I would not lie, not outright. I set myself a more interesting path: to make sure that my lies occupied the same space as the truth.

Michelle Scott Tucker’s referenced biography, Elizabeth Macarthur: A Life at the Edge of the World is a tempting companion to come back to reality after reading A Room Made of Leaves. But Grenville’s Elizabeth stays with you.

As you see more curls of truth in Tucker’s biography that appear in Grenville’s imaginary memoir, you wonder about how the real Elizabeth felt — rather than what actually happened.

Kerrie Davies , Lecturer, School of the Arts & Media, UNSW

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article .

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The Best Fiction Books » Historical Fiction

A room made of leaves, by kate grenville, recommendations from our site.

“Kate Grenville has taken the bland letters of Elizabeth Macarthur, wife of John Macarthur, the so-called ‘father of the Australian wool industry’, and read between the lines to give us an alternative story. And what a compelling tale she’s woven, of a canny, resourceful woman, not perfect by any means, but who, through her own efforts and ingenuity, is transformed from reluctant Australian immigrant, a victim of sorts, into a vigorous and successful matriarch.” Read more...

The Best Historical Fiction: The 2021 Walter Scott Prize Shortlist

Katharine Grant , Historical Novelist

Other books by Kate Grenville

Restless dolly maunder by kate grenville, our most recommended books, green darkness by anya seton, the persian boy by mary renault, the sun walks down by fiona mcfarlane, war and peace by leo tolstoy, the name of the rose by umberto eco, wolf hall by hilary mantel.

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A Room Made of Leaves by Kate Grenville

Reviewed by Mark Rubbo

Kate Grenville returns with a much-anticipated fourth novel considering Australia’s colonial past, and interactions between Australia’s First Nations peoples and colonists. Purporting to be the lost manuscript of the memoir of Elizabeth Macarthur, the wife of John Macarthur, A Room Made of Leaves describes the awakening of a young woman and the discovery of herself as someone she likes, even someone she admires.

Often described as the father of the wool industry in Australia, the Macarthur here is an ambitious and brutish bully. Forcing his attentions on the young Elizabeth, she has little recourse but to marry the young ensign. Macarthur is posted to the infant British colony at Sydney Cove. As his wife, Elizabeth has no choice but to leave her beloved Devon for the very different world of the colony. Macarthur has no real affection for his wife; she is just a prized chattel that completes his position in the small community.

Elizabeth subtly pushes back, cultivating her own friendships in the colony and establishing a weekly salon, which she hosts. At one of her salons, she bemoans her lack of formal knowledge to the colony’s chronicler, Watkin Tench. In return, he tells her about William Dawes, the colony’s astronomer and engineer. Dawes is a recluse who lives on a headland at the edge of the settlement and is a mathematical prodigy, fluent in Latin and Greek, and a great botanist. Elizabeth asks Tench to see if Dawes will give her some lessons.

Through Dawes, Elizabeth experiences things she has never known, and, also through Dawes, meets several of the local First Nations people for the first time. It is her relationship with Dawes that changes Elizabeth’s life. Meanwhile, Macarthur schemes and feuds in his efforts to gain power and fortune, finally managing to secure one hundred acres of land in Parramatta to settle upon and farm. Macarthur is so erratic that it is Elizabeth who steers the venture to its success and influence; it is Elizabeth and her story that shine. Of course, the appropriation of First Nations peoples’ land and the displacement of the local population hangs like a heavy cloud in the time of Grenville’s novel, as it does still today. This story, told through Grenville’s sharp lens, is one that will stay with the reader for a long time.

Mark Rubbo is the managing director of Readings.

A Room Made of Leaves

Kate Grenville

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REVIEW: A Room Made of Leaves by Kate Grenville

It’s been years since Kate Grenville has published a new novel and in that time her star has risen with the popularity of her Secret River trilogy. A Room Made of Leaves , in its gorgeous green hardcover jacket, is arguably one of the most hotly anticipated books of the year.

Kate Grenville (Photo by Darren James).

The novel takes the guise of the imagined secret memoir of Elizabeth Macarthur, wife of British officer-turned-wool-baron of early colonial Sydney, John Macarthur. Written history has much to say about John, the ignoble man whose ambitions for power and status were matched only by his general detestability, but all that survives of Elizabeth are a precious few politely-written letters. The Elizabeth of Kate Grenville’s imagination is nowhere near so polite.

Readers are taken on a journey from Elizabeth’s humble beginnings in rural England to her unlikely marriage to the brutish Macarthur, her new beginning as one of very few “ladies” in the new colony of New South Wales, and her eventual success as the true pastoralist that commanded the massive expanse of the convict-run Elizabeth Farm at Parramatta.

Grenville’s Elizabeth is a woman of independent thought, spirit, passion, and her own private desires. She finds satisfaction in her world by acting outside of her power-mad husband’s knowledge. As part of this personal freedom, Elizabeth has contact with some of the Gadigal and Cammeraygal women of the Sydney coastline. Based directly on the historical Elizabeth’s surviving letters, these were the moments I was most fascinated by in this story. They are wisely cast in severe contrast to the violent episode of the so-called “Battle of Parramatta” that occurs in later chapters.

An ingenious tapestry of history and invention, A Room Made of Leaves is a novel of womanhood, motherhood, secrets, lies, obsession, transformation and the loss of innocence. It’s a true pleasure to read Grenville’s writing, and this one’s been well worth the wait!

— A Room Made of Leaves by Kate Grenville (Text Publishing) is out now.

Listen to our podcast with Kate!

A Room Made of Leaves

by Kate Grenville

What if Elizabeth Macarthur-wife of the notorious John Macarthur, wool baron in the earliest days of Sydney-had written a shockingly frank secret memoir? And what if novelist Kate Grenville had miraculously found and published it? That's the starting point for A Room Made of Leaves, a playful dance of possibilities between the real and the invented.

Marriage to a ruthless bully, the impulses of her heart, the search for power in a society that gave women none - this Elizabeth...

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Ben is Booktopia's dedicated fiction and children's book specialist. He spends his days painstakingly piecing together beautiful catalogue pages and gift guides for the website. At any opportunity, he loves to write warmly of the books that inspire him. If you want to talk books, find him tweeting at @itsbenhunter

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July 25, 2020 at 8:59 pm

Excellent podcast. Great insights into an iconic time, not long after the squatters effectively took Australia’s best lands with millions of sheep in only years. The Merino and their wool exported made a select few very rich indeed, with huge mansions.

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Book review: A Room Made of Leaves by Kate Grenville

• January 7, 2022
• Fleur Morrison
• Uncategorized

It was interesting to read Kate Grenville’s historical fiction about the settlers’ experience of Australia straight after finishing Hannah Kent’s Devotion.

In Kent’s book, a religious community arrives in South Australia and settles Hanhdorf.

A Room Made of Leaves centres on the experience of the wife of the notorious John Macarthur, Elizabeth, who amassed great wealth in the early days of settlement.

His wife tells her own story of encounters with Australia’s Indigenous inhabitants, her feelings about her situation and the way she makes a bearable life in this unfamiliar land.

Grenville uses Elizabeth’s story to question who gets to write history, whose stories are told and whether those stories are true.

Hers was a fascinating voice and story, and the telling of it – even in the form of fiction – is a reminder of how much lies beneath official histories. The book asks about truth and whose history is written and remembered.

I love Grenville’s melding of fact with fiction, as she did in The Secret River. I feel it helps me understand more about the history of Australia, in all its sometimes uncomfortable complexity.

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August 22, 2024

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A Room Made of Leaves

                                .

What if Elizabeth Macarthur—wife of the notorious John Macarthur, wool baron in the earliest days of Sydney—had written a shockingly frank secret memoir? And what if novelist Kate Grenville had miraculously found and published it? That’s the starting point for  A Room Made of Leaves , a playful dance of possibilities between the real and the invented.

Marriage to a ruthless bully, the impulses of her heart, the search for power in a society that gave women none: this Elizabeth Macarthur manages her complicated life with spirit and passion, cunning and sly wit. Her memoir lets us hear—at last!—what one of those seemingly demure women from history might really have thought.

At the centre of  A Room Made of Leaves  is one of the most toxic issues of our own age: the seductive appeal of false stories. This book may be set in the past, but it’s just as much about the present, where secrets and lies have the dangerous power to shape reality.

Kate Grenville’s return to the territory of  The Secret River  is historical fiction turned inside out, a stunning sleight of hand by one of our most original writers.

“ Kate Grenville is a literary alchemist, turning the leaden shadow of the historical Elizabeth Macarthur into a luminescent, golden woman for our times. Intelligent, compassionate, strategic and dead sexy, Grenville’s Macarthur is an unforgettable character who makes us question everything we thought we knew about our colonial past. A polished gem of a novel by a writer who is as brave as she is insightful. I simply loved it.” Clare Wright

• Background to the book

The idea for  A Room Made of Leaves  was sparked nearly twenty years ago, when I was doing research for  The Secret River , a book set in the earliest years of the British colony in Australia. I came across some of the letters of Elizabeth Macarthur, wife of John Macarthur, a junior officer who arrived with his family in Sydney in 1790.

Australian history, like most histories, is a bit light-on when it comes to women, because they left so little behind.  Even when they were educated enough to write letters or journals, those writings are bland, sedate things, suitable to be shared in any genteel parlour.  Women at that time had no choice but to be bland.  Without any power over any aspect of their lives, they were obliged to go along with a social and legal system that equated them with children.  They might have talked together about what they felt about that destiny, but none of them could risk putting it in writing.

Elizabeth Macarthur’s letters are no different.  She and John and their infant son landed in a new, raw, violent, hungry penal colony – a thousand convicts and a couple of hundred guards – six months’ sail from home.  Yet from her letters – unrevealing, cheery, impersonal – you’d never know any of that.

More interesting to me was what she wrote – or didn’t write – about her husband.  The son of a draper, John Macarthur had no prospects other than what he could make for himself, and in Sydney he lost no time in squeezing every drop of advantage out of the place and his position there.  His letters – far from bland and sedate – show him to have been a clever, ruthless bully, a dangerous man to cross, violent and unforgiving towards anyone who tried to go against him.

Yet from Elizabeth’s letters there’s not the faintest shadow of any of that.  Reading her letters, you’d think he was a kindly, cheerful, reasonable man beloved of all around him.  Either he was a completely different man at home, or her letters are beautiful lies.

Enter William Dawes, another junior officer in the Sydney of 1790.  Dawes emerges from the record as a very likeable man: warm, selfless, with great integrity. He was the colony’s resident astronomer and Elizabeth Macarthur asked him for lessons in “a few easy stars”.  However, stars turned out not to be as easy as she thought and, she says, “I mistook my abilities, and I blush at my error.”

I blush at my error! In the context of her otherwise bloodless letters, those five words blaze off the page with an unmistakable erotic charge.  Suddenly – for the only time in all the many pages she wrote – she’s a flesh-and-blood woman. What might have happened after Mrs Macarthur blushed?

Those five words are where this book started.  What they told me was that she wasn’t as bland and boring as her letters might suggest.  She lived – or at least wrote – behind a mask, and just for that one instant, the mask slipped.

A body of myth has grown around Elizabeth and John Macarthur.  Generations of schoolchildren have learned that John Macarthur more or less singlehandedly bred the Australian Merino sheep that until recently was the basis of our economy. All over Australia, streets and schools are named in his honour.  The myth about Elizabeth is that, when John was away in England for two long  periods, she kept the family sheep empire going, a loving, industrious, pious helpmeet to her husband.

The slipping of the mask gave me a way to sneak in behind the myth and explore something more interesting, and possibly more true.  The way I put it to myself was that Elizabeth Macarthur had written the fictional account of her life, in those bland letters.  I was going to write the non-fictional account, the truth that she couldn’t ever risk putting on paper.  It would take the form of her secret memoirs, hidden in a tin box tucked away in the roof of her house. I’d pretend that I’d found these memoirs, and that I was simply transcribing and publishing them.  The joke-within-a-joke would be that the story would be based on the real documentary record, and would even include quotes from Elizabeth Macarthur’s real letters.  Fact and fiction would overlap and allow a fictional woman of the past to do what would have been impossible for any real woman of that time: to put down in writing what she really thought.

It was an exciting project to try to give Elizabeth Macarthur the voice she could never have had.  She was a remarkable woman, to have managed the gigantic enterprise of the family business at a time when women were expected to be helpless and ignorant and stay at home with the children. She was on her own – for four years during her husband’s first absence, nine years the second – in a brutal society, yet she came to thrive. By the time Macarthur came back from that second absence, he was overwhelmed by mental illness, but the business his wife had managed so well was the richest in the colony.

But as I wrote, I realised that this was more than a book about an extraordinary woman.  It was about the dangerous power of false stories, false surfaces, myths, and they way they can erase the truth.  Women were not the only people whose voices were silenced.  In the Australian context, the other great silencing concerns the story of the Aboriginal people.  The accounts left by those early settlers are the only written accounts of that history, but as Elizabeth Macarthur warns us, Do not believe too quickly!

I travelled to Devon to research Elizabeth’s childhood, and spent many hours at Elizabeth Farm and other locations around Parramatta.  I drew on as many primary sources as I could find: the parish records of Bridgerule in Devon, archives in the State Library of NSW, Governors’ correspondence, and contemporary accounts of early Sydney.   A Room Made of Leaves  had found its form and content by the time Michelle Scott Tucker’s biography of Elizabeth Macarthur was published, and I didn’t draw on that book in writing my own, but Michelle was helpful in advising me how to contact Macarthur descendants to let them know of the book (which I did as a courtesy to them). My reading of the primary sources has sometimes led me in a different direction from other writers about Elizabeth Macarthur.  But what I think we all share is admiration for that remarkable woman.

This book isn’t history. It’s fiction. But, like most historical fiction, it starts in the same place history does: in the record of the past left to us in documents, oral traditions, buildings, landscapes and objects.   Historians devise one kind of story from those sources.  Fiction writers devise another kind. Those sources are flawed, partial and ambiguous.  For that reason, the stories that come out of them, although starting in the same place, can end up very differently.  But what historians and writers of historical fiction have in common is an urge to understand that past: what it meant then, and perhaps more importantly, what it means now: for us, living in the world that’s been shaped by that past.

I WAS NOT AN ORPHAN

When baby sister Grace died I was five years old, too young to know the word.   Dead.   I barely understood what a sister was, still hoping this new creature in the house, this squalling red bully, was only temporary. 

Mother was still puffy-eyed from burying her when Father took the same distemper and was gone.  It had to be explained to me, they thought they were explaining.    With the angels.  In a better place.     

-No, I screamed, seeing the box on the trestles in the parlour, but how can he breathe, get him out!

At the service I kept twisting around, waiting for Father to come in the door and sit down with us. Mother liked to tell the story, laughing in a bitter way, about me twisting and wriggling, running to the door, looking down the lane calling out for him.  No one could quieten you, she’d say.  Father! Father! you shouted till Mr Bond had to take you out.  I could not bear it, the noise of you, and of course I wanted him to come up the lane too, every time you called Father! it was a knife in my heart.

Before that was the feeling that that the day could last as long as I wished, and none of it needed to be spent indoors. There was the feeling of fields, and animals busy about their own lives, and the way those lives were bound intimately to mine.  When my hands were big enough I learned to milk the cow.   It is almost the only memory I have of Father, the smell of his tweed, his big warm self beside me, taking my hands in his and putting them on the teats, wrapping my fingers around their damp softness. I felt him chuckle with pleasure when I got the knack of the little movement that made the milk hiss against the inside of the pail.

Being the relict of Richard Veale of Lodgeworthy Farm did not become Mother.  She was broken by widowhood, or perhaps she had never been more than a reed leaning on her husband.  She shrivelled, took to her bed, went into glum silent abstractions by the fire, punctuated with sighs that made me tiptoe away, frightened of this adult despair.

  I heard her one morning, speaking under the window, softly, but the words floated up.

– I cannot even look forward to a son to take his place, she said, the   his   meaning Father’s.

Mr Kingdon rumbled in reply, too rumbly for me to make out the words.

– The best I can hope for might be a son-in-law, if she can manage it, she said, the   she   being me. 

Mr Kingdon must have tried to offer some kind of irritating comfort, in which a reverend like him was well practised, because there was a sharp edge when she answered. 

-Well, sir, I can pray, and I can live in hope and expectation.  But for the time being it is just me and a wilful girl with no looks and no portion either.

I had been leaning up at the windowsill, listening in an idle way, not much concerned whether they saw me, but at that I sank down out of sight and crouched against the wall, making myself shrink to the smallest volume.    A wilful girl.   That word,   wilful , gave me a picture of myself I did not quite recognise. I knew I was a child full of sparks. Knew I had a temper and a quick wit, a quick tongue, and got into enough trouble for them. That was the person I was.   But now I knew that you called that   wilful . And being wilful  – I heard it in my mother’s tone – was something that made you unlikeable.  I was hot with a sudden shame for being wilful, as well as for having no looks and no portion, ashamed that no one would want me.   Ashamed for my mother too, in speaking that way of her daughter. 

I could smell the dust in the curtains and feel the cold draft from the crack where the skirting did not quite meet the floor. That smell and the feel of a narrow draft still fill me with the same terrible knowledge that came to me, hearing her words: I was not an orphan, but might as well be, for all I had a parent to look out for me.

Cristina Sanders' blog

Book reviews, colonial history. Jerningham Wakefield. Running. All here.

A Room Made of Leaves—book review

A Room Made of Leaves, by Kate Grenville

John Macarthur was a British lieutenant who sailed on the second fleet to Botany Bay in 1790 with his wife and child. By all accounts he is a thoroughly nasty man, quarrelsome and jealous. As he manipulates his way to grants of land and stock his influence and holdings increase dramatically. This much is recorded history. But he is not the hero of this story.

In A Room Made of Leaves Macarthur’s supposedly loyal and supportive wife steps up and offers a new version of their lives. The known history of Elizabeth Macarthur is of a cultured and intelligent woman who hosts early society in a scene of domestic bliss —a orderly foil to her husband’s belligerence. She’s his little help-meet as he grows his sheep empire. Her letters home are full of the delights of society without mention of the hell hole of the colonial penal colony. You can imagine historian Kate Grenville’s BS monitor flashing as she reads straight between the lines.

Grenville supposedly discovers a stash of documents in an attic, letters and diaries written by this clever woman that reveal what really happened in those early, hostile days of the Australian colony. She transcribes them for us and they read with the beautiful clarity that is pure Grenville.

My disbelief kicked in pretty early—there’s a modern voice in the telling of intimate things. It’s not that colonial woman didn’t think, or experience such things, but they would never have put them to paper. I doubt they would have had the words to articulate them. But I adored this story, Elizabeth is a magnificent heroine —a woman with few options who finds the strength to create a world for herself that makes life bearable, a place where she can not only survive her noxious husband, but find pleasure.

The titular Room Made of Leaves is a physical place where Elizabeth goes (without her husband, obviously) to find joy but also is a metaphor for a space created in her head where only beauty and kindness can enter. A woman controlled by a sociopath is, unfortunately, a common enough story but set in this world of convicts and enforced prostitution, brutal land grabs, racism and sexism, for a woman to control any part of her life appears a remarkable achievement. As 21st Century readers, we can only weep for the plight of our historic sisters.

If you enjoyed Grenville’s The Secret River (it’s one of my favourite books of all time), and enjoy well paced and informative historical fiction, race to the bookshop for this one.

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Life With All The Books

Book reviews, book chat – basically anything books , a room made of leaves by kate grenville – book review.

Title : A Room Made of Leaves

Author : Kate Grenville

Genre : Historical Fiction

Publisher : Canongate

Publication Date : 6th August 2020

Rating : 4/5

It is 1788. Twenty-one-year-old Elizabeth is hungry for life but, as the ward of a Devon clergyman, knows she has few prospects. When proud, scarred soldier John Macarthur promises her the earth one midsummer’s night, she believes him.

But Elizabeth soon realises she has made a terrible mistake. Her new husband is reckless, tormented, driven by some dark rage at the world. He tells her he is to take up a position as Lieutenant in a New South Wales penal colony and she has no choice but to go. Sailing for six months to the far side of the globe with a child growing inside her, she arrives to find Sydney Town a brutal, dusty, hungry place of makeshift shelters, failing crops, scheming and rumours.

All her life she has learned to be obliging, to fold herself up small. Now, in the vast landscapes of an unknown continent, Elizabeth has to discover a strength she never imagined, and passions she could never express.

Inspired by the real life of a remarkable woman, this is an extraordinarily rich, beautifully wrought novel of resilience, courage and the mystery of human desire.

I was so intrigued by the blurb of A Room Made of Leaves because it takes place in a setting I know relatively little about. The story follows a young woman, Elizabeth, who finds herself tied through marriage to an unpleasant and difficult man – John Macarthur. Through the circumstances of her husbands job, Elizabeth is forced to leave her home country and begin a new life with him in a New South Wales penal colony, Sydney Town, where life can be harsh and complicated. Elizabeth manages to use her strength and intelligence to carve out some happiness and success for herself despite her husband’s best efforts to cause discord.

I am totally in love with the gorgeous cover of this book and happily the contents is just as beautifully done as the cover. The prose is really lovely, Grenville has en elegance to her writing which makes reading A Room Made of Leaves hugely enjoyable. Her writing almost has a sense of musicality to it which I loved. The book is structured in an interesting manner, in a way it is like a collection of interconnected short stories that builds a picture of the life of this intriguing woman. I don’t want to give away too much about the twist on Elizabeth’s story that A Room Made of Leaves is but I found it a really interesting way to tell her tale. I also really liked the Elizabeth that Grenville has conjured. She is direct, practical and loath to self pity in a way which makes her easy to root for.

This is a work of historical fiction and the historical aspect is skilfully portrayed – it evokes a real sense of place and time whilst also demonstrating the snobbery and high-mindedness of colonialism in an understated but still impactful way. The reader is able to see the trauma caused by the British and the affect it has on the indigenous people through the eyes of Elizabeth who becomes very aware that the land she grows to love is not really hers. It brings up difficult questions which deserve to be considered whilst also telling the story of a brave and capable woman. We will never know what the real Elizabeth Macarthur was like but Grenville has created a plausible rendition of her whilst telling a story of the difficulties faced by women in a world ruled by men. An engaging and interesting book which is beautifully written.

I kindly received a copy of the book from the publisher. My review is my own honest opinion.

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7 thoughts on “ a room made of leaves by kate grenville – book review ”.

Oooh this sounds like an amazing book!

NEED 😍😍😍😍😍😍 that cover is just GORGEOUS! And it sounds soooo good. Adding this to my TBR for sure ☺️☺️☺️💜💚🧡

Like Liked by 1 person

It’s such a beautiful cover isn’t it?! It might be one of my favourite cover designs of the year and the book is really good too! 💚💙💚💙💚

This sounds amazing! Adding to my TBR. Great review 💕

Thank you! ☺️It’s a really evocative book! 💜

I need to read this one. I have enjoyed Grenville’s historical novels before!

It’s really great! 😊 I haven’t read any of Grenville’s work before this one but I’m definitely adding them to my TBR! 💛

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Book review: 'A Room Made of Leaves' by Kate Grenville anchors fiction to fact about early settlers in New South Wales

The author’s vivid captures of nature is impressive in 'A Room Made of Leaves' (Photo: Canon Gate)

Kate Grenville anchors fiction to fact in A Room Made of Leaves , dipping into documented accounts by early settlers in New South Wales to spin a novel that starts with this epigraph: Do not believe too quickly!

Just as quickly, the author has readers believing that Elizabeth Macarthur had left behind a secret memoir tucked under the roof of her home about her unhappy marriage to John Macarthur, the man credited with founding Australia’s wool industry. Years after he died — racked by lunacy towards the end — Elizabeth, in the evening of life, is free at last to speak and Grenville professes to transcribe her story.

Wariness had become a habit for Elizabeth Veale, a lass folded up small after her widowed mother rides off with a new husband, leaving her under the care of her grandfather, then the Kingdons in Devon, England. Wilful and clever but too curious for her own good, she falls for the flattery of John Macarthur, a poor soldier who woos her with hand on heart and a tilt of the head.

With child after a tremulous midsummer night and nowhere to hide, Elizabeth settles for marriage to moody Macarthur, a man lacking in looks, charm and means. The arrogant, ambitious son of a draper schemes to prove his worth. So, when the chance comes to set sail for the new penal colony of New South Wales in 1790, Macarthur grabs the posting and drags her along, seeing an opportunity to make money to pay off a debt.

kate-grenville-bg-v7.jpg

Options is the award-winning lifestyle pullout of The Edge Malaysia, the country’s premier business and investment weekly publication.

A room made of leaves – review

Dear readers, I hope you and your families are well. I really appreciate all the comments you leave on my posts and the emails you send me – it’s lovely to know that our words are connecting us.

This week, I bring you a review from one of Australia’s great fiction and non-fiction writers – Kate Grenville . Kate has a writing career spanning decades and has recently published her 16th book.

Her latest novel is A room made of leaves , a historical novel set in Australia in the late 18th century. Kate positions herself, Kate Grenville, as the editor of Elizabeth Macarthur’s secret diary, which is a fictionalised account of Elizabeth’s story of moving to Australia and surviving life there despite her husband’s bullish behaviour and actions.

Kate wrote a letter to readers on the Text Publishing blog , explaining that she had her idea when she read five words in a letter from Elizabeth – I blush at my error. The words were so unlike the restrained, bland and polite letters which Elizabeth usually wrote home. Kate knew she had a story here.

And she does. It’s a wonderful, immersing read.

While A room made of leaves is all about Elizabeth McArthur with a scattering of minor female characters, it made me think about all the stories of other women who made a new life in Australia in the 1780s.

There’s a fabulous interview with Kate Mildenhall and Kate Grenville on The first time podcast. Kate will also appear in an interview this Sunday with the Yarra Valley Writers festival.

Happy reading and listening!

Ovarian cancer day

It’s amazing to think of how women adapt to enormous challenges. I love reading these stories based on real life events.

Karen Comer

Me too, Pam!

I love historical fiction so will certainly try this one. Philippa Gregory is one of my favourite historical novelists. I love the way she weaves a story around real events and people. I’m sure Kate Grenville does the same. I’m almost finished The Dictionary of Lost Words and really enjoying it.

I haven’t read any Philippa Gregory books, so will add her books to my to-be-read pile. Thanks, Kathy!

I marvel at writers who take a few words “I blush at my error” and have the basis for a story. Certainly clever and creative.

I know – so clever and creative!

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A Room Made of Leaves by Kate Grenville

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A Room Made of Leaves  by Kate Grenville

Text Publishing, $39.99 hb, 322 pp

K ate Grenville’s new novel, her first in almost a decade, is dedicated to ‘all those whose stories have been silenced’, for which, as its ‘memoirist’–narrator heroine is Elizabeth Macarthur, we might read ‘women’. Did she – wife of the notorious John Macarthur, wool baron in early Sydney – write what Grenville’s publishers call ‘a shockingly frank secret memoir’? In her ‘Editor’s Note’, Grenville tells, tongue firmly in cheek, of there being discovered in the ceiling of a historic Parramatta house under renovation a long-hidden box containing that memoir. In an ‘Author’s Note’ at the book’s end, we are assured that ‘No, there was no box of secrets found in the roof of Elizabeth Farm. I didn’t [as she claimed at the beginning, in her Editor’s Note] transcribe and edit what you’ve just read. I wrote it.’ Perhaps those who thought otherwise failed to observe the book’s epigraph from Elizabeth Macarthur – ‘Do not believe too quickly’ – though whether those words were inscribed by the historic Elizabeth or by Grenville’s fictional one may be a matter for discussion. Apropos of previous books, Grenville the novelist has had disputes with historians about matters of fiction and fact.

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• Kate Grenville

Don Anderson

• Text Publishing
• Australian Fiction

Don Anderson is the author/editor of eight books, collections of essays and reviews, and anthologies of prose, largely of texts from the Americas, Australia, and Europe. For fourteen years in the 1980s and 1990s he was a regular literary columnist in the National Times and the Sydney Morning Herald . He was for thirty years a member of the English department at the University of Sydney, where he taught American, Irish, and Australian literature, and literary theory. He was for some years a member of the Advisory Panel of ABR .

A Room Made of Leaves

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Sign up to the weekly what’s on, a room made of leaves (kate grenville) – book review.

Kate Grenville continues her exploration of the early days of the colonisation of Australia in her latest book A Room Made of Leaves. This book purports to be the previously unseen memoirs of Elizabeth Macarthur. Macarthur has long been overshadowed in popular Australian history by her husband John, who is widely reputed to be the founder of Australian sheep industry but also led a military coup against Governor Bligh in the Rum Rebellion. In these memoirs Elizabeth Macarthur (and Grenville) seeks to set the record straight about both their relationship and some major events in the early history of the colony of Sydney.

The memoir takes Elizabeth back to her earliest days as Elizabeth Veale, growing up on her grandfather’s farm in Devon and later being taken in by her best friend’s family. These early chapters feel a little Jane Austen as Elizabeth’s friend Bridie is courted by a young soldier and Elizabeth catches the eye of his friend John Macarthur. Of the two it is Elizabeth who ends up married due to an indiscretion and soon John is seeking his fortune by signing up to travel with the second fleet to the fledgling penal settlement in Sydney. The rest of the book describes the early development of the colony through Elizabeth’s eyes as her husband connives his way to power, fortune and land and she learns how to play on his weaknesses to her own ends.

This is the fourth of Grenville’s novels of early Sydney, the first being The Secret River. But it is most closely connected to her second of these novels The Lieutenant. That book was a fantasy on the life of William Dawes (in that book called Daniel Rooke), who did astronomy and befriended the local Aboriginal people. A Room Made of Leaves is more solidly based in the historical record so Dawes himself appears as a main character as does chronicler Watkin Tench. It is Dawes and his illicit relationship with Macarthur (a liaison that Grenville intuits from that record) which give rise to the name of the book.

Despite its setting, Grenville’s Elizabeth Macarthur has a fairly modern sensibility particularly when it comes to her attitudes to the Aboriginal people displaced by the colony. Partly this can be explained by her relationship with Dawes, who himself had at least an amicable relationship with some of the local people. But partly, this feels like Grenville’s editorial hand, giving a more nuanced view of the indigenous groups who were being forced away from their traditional lands than the actual Elizabeth Macarthur may have had.

Where A Room Made of Leaves is successful is in surfacing the very real influence that Elizabeth Macarthur would have had on the development of Australia’s wool industry, an achievement more usually attributed to her husband. After establishing the farm and bringing in the sheep, John Macarthur spent much of his time in Sydney and then later, in two long stints back in England. Elizabeth Macarthur was a strong, independent woman in her own right, having to deal with the constraints placed upon her and the novel charts her development and all that she learns both from her husband and in from having to deal with him.

A Room Made of Leaves is another fascinating journey into Sydney’s earliest days. While Grenville plays a little fast and loose with the actual history, she delivers a feel for the place, events and people who shaped the development of the Colony. And she does this, as she often does, through voices that have traditionally been silenced.

Robert Goodman For more of Robert’s reviews, please visit his blog Pile By the Bed

Other reviews you might enjoy:.

• Our Dark Secret (Jenny Quintana) – book review
• The Burning Island (Jock Serong) – book review
• Dead Letters (Michael Brissenden) – book review

Robert Goodman is a book reviewer, former Ned Kelly Awards judge and institutionalised public servant based in Sydney. This and over 450 more book reviews can be found on his website Pile By the Bed.

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A Room Made of Leaves: Kate Grenville’s thought-provoking new novel

Nearly 20 years ago, while researching her modern Australian classic, The Secret River, Kate Grenville came across the letters of Elizabeth Macarthur, the wife of John Macarthur, a British army officer who came to Sydney with his family on the Second Fleet.

The letters gave little sense of Elizabeth as a person, but the author was intrigued by the gap that seemed to exist between their polite tone and the immense challenges that their writer and her young children must have faced in the penal colony.

From this apparent disjuncture emerges Grenville’s vivid and thought-provoking new novel, her first in nearly a decade. A Room Made of Leaves adopts the guise of a long-lost secret memoir apparently written by Elizabeth in her old age.

Describing herself as merely the transcriber and editor of her protagonist’s work, Grenville traces Elizabeth’s story — or her interpretation of it — from her childhood in rural Devon through her hasty marriage to “perhaps one of the most difficult men on the planet”.

Elizabeth emerges as a spirited and sharply intelligent woman who is painfully aware of the constraints of her status, of being “no more than a tenant in my body”, even as she gains awareness of how to effectively wield her limited influence.

Indeed, Grenville credits her with responsibility for a good deal of her husband’s success, including his reputation as the father of Australia’s wool industry. And yet, as Elizabeth reminds the reader, “you have only my word for any of this”. “Do not believe too quickly,” she warns.

Though A Room Made of Leaves is focused on Elizabeth, Grenville also considers other gaps in the historical archive — particularly the silences that exist around Australia’s Aboriginal history.

Thus the book engages with highly relevant questions about power, truth and false narratives, identifying “the replacement of the true history by a false one” as “another, fundamental form of violence”.

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A Room Made of Leaves by Kate Grenville

Review | Issue: Aug 2020

Category: Fiction & related items

Book Format: Hardback

Publisher: Text Publishing

ISBN: 9781922330024

RRP: $39.99

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11 kids books about Indigenous history, culture and life

There are many books published about Indigenous history, culture and life. Here are 11 recommended books for young readers to learn about Indigenous Australian peoples.

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Book Review: 'How to Leave the House' by Nathan Newman marks the debut of a bold new fiction voice

“How to Leave the House” by Nathan Newman marks the debut of a new voice in fiction, writes Associated Press reviewer Rob Merrill

Before you read a word of “How to Leave the House” by Nathan Newman, it may help to know that a TV adaptation is already in the works. This is a book that unfolds like it’s destined for the small screen. “It was a cinematic sunset: pinks, oranges and periwinkle blues… Beneath it all was lonely Natwest, a single figure on the empty street…” That passage is about midway through the book, but you get the point. There are other parts that read like stage directions and the novel’s point of view switches from inside the mind of our “hero,” Natwest, to the perspectives of various town residents he encounters during the day.

Let’s back up. This is the story of a young Englishman named Natwest. It is the day before he departs his hometown for the first time for university. He’s intelligent, opinionated, and planning to study art history. He has ordered something embarrassing and the Royal Mail has not delivered it on time. The object in question is revealed on page 50, but it’s too funny to spoil. The plot, such as it is, unfolds over the course of 24 hours as Natwest leaves his house initially for a trip to the post office. When it turns out another town resident has taken possession of the package instead, Natwest’s journey of discovery truly begins.

It’s during his encounters with town residents that Natwest’s perspective begins to change. The pretentious and self-centered young man gives way to someone whose interior monologue sounds like this near the end: “Natwest had always imagined himself to be the main character. … He’d always thought he was leaving them (the town’s residents) behind, but it dawned on him now that it was more likely they were leaving him behind. He was but a minor character in their lives.”

Those lives are rich with pathos and humor. There’s a dentist in love with a trans woman who loves to paint, but only human mouths. There’s an imam who is at heart a cinephile. And a teenager having suicidal thoughts after the leak of nude pictures on the internet. Mix it all up with a secret surrounding Natwest’s own origin story, and you begin to see how it might be a better TV show than it is a book.

But don’t let that stop you from reading it. Fair warning: It is graphic in its description of sexual encounters and doesn’t shy away from difficult topics, including self harm. The humor helps take the edge off a little, but Newman certainly has something to say about the up-and-coming generation. This is a bold new voice, and one to watch.

AP book reviews: https://apnews.com/hub/book-reviews

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Book Review: ‘How to Leave the House’ by Nathan Newman marks the debut of a bold new fiction voice

This book cover image released by Viking shows “How to Leave the House” by Nathan Newman. (Viking via AP)

• Copy Link copied

Before you read a word of “How to Leave the House” by Nathan Newman, it may help to know that a TV adaptation is already in the works. This is a book that unfolds like it’s destined for the small screen. “It was a cinematic sunset: pinks, oranges and periwinkle blues… Beneath it all was lonely Natwest, a single figure on the empty street…” That passage is about midway through the book, but you get the point. There are other parts that read like stage directions and the novel’s point of view switches from inside the mind of our “hero,” Natwest, to the perspectives of various town residents he encounters during the day.

Let’s back up. This is the story of a young Englishman named Natwest. It is the day before he departs his hometown for the first time for university. He’s intelligent, opinionated, and planning to study art history. He has ordered something embarrassing and the Royal Mail has not delivered it on time. The object in question is revealed on page 50, but it’s too funny to spoil. The plot, such as it is, unfolds over the course of 24 hours as Natwest leaves his house initially for a trip to the post office. When it turns out another town resident has taken possession of the package instead, Natwest’s journey of discovery truly begins.

It’s during his encounters with town residents that Natwest’s perspective begins to change. The pretentious and self-centered young man gives way to someone whose interior monologue sounds like this near the end: “Natwest had always imagined himself to be the main character. … He’d always thought he was leaving them (the town’s residents) behind, but it dawned on him now that it was more likely they were leaving him behind. He was but a minor character in their lives.”

Those lives are rich with pathos and humor. There’s a dentist in love with a trans woman who loves to paint, but only human mouths. There’s an imam who is at heart a cinephile. And a teenager having suicidal thoughts after the leak of nude pictures on the internet. Mix it all up with a secret surrounding Natwest’s own origin story, and you begin to see how it might be a better TV show than it is a book.

But don’t let that stop you from reading it. Fair warning: It is graphic in its description of sexual encounters and doesn’t shy away from difficult topics, including self harm. The humor helps take the edge off a little, but Newman certainly has something to say about the up-and-coming generation. This is a bold new voice, and one to watch.

AP book reviews: https://apnews.com/hub/book-reviews

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Takeoff in 3, 2, 1: Lewiston-Auburn Balloon Festival begins Friday

Fourteen hot-air balloons will be soaring above the Twin Cities Friday through Sunday, with a lot more fun happening at the Simard-Payne Memorial Park in Lewiston.

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Tim Cavanaugh works on the electrical systems Wednesday for the Lewiston-Auburn Balloon Festival at Simard-Payne Memorial Park in Lewiston. The three-day festival starts Friday and features 15 hot air balloons, 14 nonprofit food vendors, and over 100 artisans. Andree Kehn/Sun Journal

LEWISTON — The Lewiston-Auburn Balloon Festival is finally here.

The fun begins early Friday morning, with the first launch scheduled for 6 a.m. from the Simard-Payne Memorial Park on Beech Street in Lewiston. The park is set to host festivalgoers until Sunday evening, with something for everyone.

The festival has come a long way in a short time. In May, the original organizers of the Great Falls Balloon Festival called it off due to a lack of resources . Soon after, the Twin Cities came together to run it instead.

In recognition of the shared effort between Lewiston and Auburn, the festival was renamed. In the time since, community support has poured in, with dozens of vendors and a variety of sponsors, as well as a $60,000 grant from the State Office of Tourism.

As of Wednesday afternoon, the festival is $2,340 short of its fundraising goal.

“We’ve secured $167,660 in pledges on a really short timeline,” Nate Libby, Lewiston’s assistant director of economic and community development, said Wednesday. “A few more sponsorships are trickling in. The original goal for sponsorships was $170,000. We are so proud of and grateful for all the businesses, organizations and individuals who’ve stepped up to support the festival with their time, effort, and financial support.” Advertisement

“We’ve secured 10 hot air balloons, five specialty shape balloons, 14 nonprofit food vendors, over 100 artisans and crafter booths, a parade, a family fun day, musical performances including Motor Booty Affair, Julia Gagnon, Taylor Hughes, among other musicians,” Libby added. “Lots of other special events, entertainment, and family friendly activities. And the weather looks good!”

Check out the Lewiston-Auburn Balloon Festival coverage

Jake Dostie, left, and Larry Mosher prepare a sign Wednesday for one of the 14 nonprofit food vendors serving at this weekend’s Lewiston-Auburn Balloon Festival at Simard-Payne Memorial Park in Lewiston. Andree Kehn/Sun Journal

The weather looks good, indeed.

“Friday morning looks pretty nice. The winds begin very light and then pick up,” Greg Cornwell, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service’s Forecast Office in Gray/Portland, said. “It’ll be an onshore wind, so (coming) from the southeast, as the day goes on. But winds are, especially in the morning, expected to be relatively calm.”

Friday afternoon might be a little more breezy, Cornwell added. “Nothing generally less than, I’d say, 15 miles per hour. So, probably still an OK condition for (balloons).”

The area could have some showers across the interior, but “those will be more towards the mountains versus treading into the Lewiston area,” Cornwell said.

Friday’s temperatures will be cool for this time of year, around 78 degrees for the day’s high. The day might be a “near-perfect day,” for a balloon festival, Cornwell said. Advertisement

Carnival workers set up rides Wednesday on Lincoln Street in Lewiston, outside Simard-Payne Memorial Park, in preparation for the Lewiston-Auburn Balloon Festival. Balloon launches will be livestreamed if the weather is favorable. Andree Kehn/Sun Journal

There’s a chance of rain on Saturday and Sunday, but the weekend forecast might change later in the week.

With over 80 volunteer sign-ups, the festival is no longer accepting volunteer applications. Lewiston Public Works is preparing the grounds at the Simard-Payne Memorial Park, Mayor Carl Sheline said Wednesday.

According to Sheline, the city expects over 100,000 visitors for the weekend. “While we are two cities, we are one community and I’m proud (Lewiston and Auburn) could come together to get this festival off the ground for our residents and tourists from around the world,” Sheline said.

Not fond of heights or crowds? The Sun Journal is bringing all the balloon action to people via livestreams.

All morning and evening launches will be livestreamed at Sun Journal’s YouTube channel . There will be a play-by-play live blog from the festival grounds as the balloons take flight.

Justin Verrill, left, and O’Neil Thorpe work on signs Wednesday in preparation for this weekend’s Lewiston-Auburn Balloon Festival at Simard-Payne Memorial Park in Lewiston. The festival kicks off Friday morning with a 6 a.m. launch. Andree Kehn/Sun Journal

For trivia enthusiasts, the balloon trivia quiz is still live . Ashley Ellsworth was the lucky winner of two balloon ride tickets. People only need an email address to test their knowledge of balloon trivia ahead of Friday. Advertisement

The Sun Journal will have a tent at the festival grounds to greet people.

For those who have a large driveway without any obstructions, like nearby utility poles, a balloon might land on the property. To signal your desire to host a balloon landing, lay out a white sheet to show it is somewhere safe to land. Road access is important because the chase team will need to park directly next to the balloon.

Check out the Lewiston-Auburn Balloon Festival coverage at SunJournal.com/balloonfestival.

Admission is free. Only service animals are allowed on the festival grounds.

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Complete schedule: Launches, live music and activities at the Lewiston-Auburn Balloon Festival

‘A Modern Miracle’ when a balloon ascended in Lewiston in 1893

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