Summary: This is the story of the youngest child of the family at the heart of The Secret River. Although this is a sequel to the earlier book, you don’t need to have read The Secret River to enjoy Sarah Thornhill – this is a stand-alone novel. Sarah is born in 1816, her father an ex-convict who’s made good in the new colony of Australia. Three hundred acres, a fine stone house, the money rolling in – William Thornhill is a man who’s re-invented himself. As he tells his daughter, he never looks back, and Sarah grows up learning not to ask about the past.
Her stepmother calls her wilful, but handsome Jack Langland loves Sarah and she loves him. Me and Jack, she thinks, what could go wrong? But there’s a secret in the Thornhill family. It comes out, as secrets will, and draws everything into its tangles. It casts a long chill shadow over life in the Hawkesbury valley.
That secret propels Sarah backwards, into the darkness of her family’s past. And it propels her forwards, into a future very different from the one she’d imagined for herself. She travels across the ocean to the wild coasts of New Zealand, and among the strangers of that other place she sees the way things truly are.
What I thought: This was great. Not quite as good as The Secret River but much better than The Lieutenant.
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