Salt Creek

by Lucy Treloar

Overview

Voted The Times' Book of the Year, Salt Creek is an Australian historical novel about a family pursuing their dreams, duty, and displacement.

‘Salt Creek is a love song to a lost world' The Guardian

A story of love, duty, hardship and intolerance through the eyes of a strong woman in 1850s colonial Australia.

The comfortable and respectable life Hester Finch now leads in Chichester, England, could not be further from the hardship her family endured on leaving Adelaide for Salt Creek in 1855. Yet she finds her thoughts drawn back to that remote, beautiful and inhospitable outcrop of South Australia and the connections she and her siblings forged there, far from the city society in which they had been raised. Encounters with the few travellers passing along the nearby stock route and the local indigenous people, in particular a boy, Tully, whom Hester's father seeks to educate almost as his own son, would change the fates of the Finches forever; nor would life ever be the same again for those who had long called the area home. 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781910709412
Publisher:	Gallic Books Limited
Publication date:	09/05/2017
Pages:	464
Product dimensions:	5.08(w) x 7.80(h) x (d)

About the Author

Lucy Treloar was born in Malaysia and educated in Melbourne, England and Sweden, and worked for several years in Cambodia. Awards for her writing include the 2014 Commonwealth Short Story Prize. Salt Creek is her first novel. Lucy lives in Melbourne with her husband, four children and two whippets.

Editorial Reviews

'Salt Creek is a love song to a lost world… the precision of Treloar’s poetry stops the heart’ The Guardian

‘This is another brilliant and absorbing addition to the recent crop of exceptionally fine historical novels exploring the Australian pioneer experience and is very highly recommended’ Historical Novels Review Magazine

‘Salt Creek is a raw and convincing addition to the canon. Treloar writes with beauty and a winning compassion’ The Times, Book of the Month

‘Empathetic and beautifully written, the story drives deep into the pioneering experience with the confidence of a writer perfectly at ease with her subject’ Daily Mail

‘[An] impressive debut… a haunting story’ The Sunday Times

‘Brilliant and engaging, Salt Creek is first-rate historical fiction’ Foreword Review

‘A historical novel in its grittiest, most real form’ Good Housekeeping

‘This engrossing novel is rich in character and local colour.’ Woman and Home

‘Salt Creek is an intense personal story, a very human story and a great read’ New Books Magazine

‘Hester Finch is a wonderful character – the brave heart of this haunting, absorbing story’ Kirsty Wark

‘Salt Creek is a novel alive with character, history and poetry, leading us with careful understatement into the unfamiliar world of the Coorong region of Southern Australia’ Walter Scott Prize Jury

‘Evocative and beautifully written debut novel, set in 19th century Australia. Rich with landscape and stifling heat, it is absorbing and thought-provoking’ The Bookbag

‘Salt Creek is historical fiction at its best, ferrying us to distant shores that seem curiously relevant to our own’ Toast Magazine [Ink@84]

‘Refigures the historical novel … Salt Creek introduces a capacious new talent’ The Australian

‘Written with a profound respect for history: with an understanding that beyond a certain point, the past and its people are unknowable’ Sydney Morning Herald

‘[A] deeply moving story about love and rejection as much as it is about the impact of European settlement and the destruction of Indigenous culture’ Sunday Age

‘A haunting story, beautifully written and quietly subversive. It’s a spectacular debut.’ ANZ Lit Lovers

From the Publisher