A Woman of the Inner Sea

By Thomas Keneally

Woman of the Inner Sea is Thomas Keneally’s strongest, most compelling work since his Booker Prize-winning Schindler’s List. Like that book, the story of Woman of the Inner Sea arises from a true incident, and once more the imagining of it is utterly convincing.
 
Kate Gaffney-Kozinski, an attractive, well educated woman, has gone on “walkabout” to the inner reaches of the Australian outback. Fleeing her wealthy husband, Paul Kozinski, and his unscrupulous clan, Kate is trying to obliterate herself and the grief that haunts her. At first we do not understand its source, but as the story unfolds a kind of mystery evolves around the tragic loss of her two children. In a small town she tries to change herself into a different woman, seeking the companionship and protection of a reticent but rough local man, an explosives expert known as Jelly. But the violence of the west country’s unpredictable weather forces her on and soon she must confront her husband.
 
No one knows Australian society better than Thomas Keneally, who offers here a rich cross-section of his people: from Kate’s prominent father to her controversial uncle, a renegade priest; from the grasping Kozinskis who rule Sydney’s construction business to colorful small-town men like Jelly and his friend Gus, who travels with a kangaroo and emu he has rescued from an entertainment park. And at the center of this panorama stands Kate, a passionate woman of great integrity caught in a nightmare of grief and deception. Woman of the Inner Sea, with its evocation of the heroic in the midst of disaster and evil, will be remembered as one of Thomas Keneally’s best works.  

• Language: English
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Release date: Oct 19, 2011
• ISBN: 9780307800626

Thomas Keneally

Thomas Keneally began his writing career in 1964 and has published thirty-three novels since, most recently Crimes of the Father, Napoleon’s Last Island, Shame and the Captives, and the New York Times bestselling The Daughters of Mars. He is also the author of Schindler’s List, which won the Booker Prize in 1982, The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, Gossip from the Forest, and Confederates, all of which were shortlisted for the Booker Prize. He has also written several works of nonfiction, including his boyhood memoir Homebush Boy, The Commonwealth of Thieves, and Searching for Schindler. He is married with two daughters and lives in Sydney, Australia.

Reviews for A Woman of the Inner Sea

[thorold_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I read a couple of Thomas Keneally’s novels about 25 years ago, when I was going through a craze for all things Australian, but I've rather lost sight of him since then. I don't think I was particularly impressed back then, but this book has made me rethink a bit. I will have to look a bit more closely at what he has written.This is a rather different kind of novel from Schindler’s List and The Playmaker. The setting is contemporary (1990s), the mood is not so much polemical as affectionately satirical. Keneally sends up the stock clichés of Australianness - on the one hand the jet-setting Sydney middle classes, with their sleazy basis of gambling and political corruption underwritten by big business, the unions, the Catholic Church and the Labour Party; on the other hand the ugliness and isolation of rural small towns where “battlers” try to scrape a living in the face of the implacable forces of nature. In a plot that’s clearly meant to take the mickey out of both Patrick White and Peter Carey, Keneally has his central character, a damaged Sydney sophisticate, seek redemption by becoming a barmaid and eating a lot of greasy food. Naturally, there's an Epic Disaster Scene (with more than a hint of Henry Lawson) and a mystical relationship with a transcendental kangaroo (D.H. Lawrence!?!) thrown in for good measure. This might all sound like too much of a good thing, but Keneally handles it surprisingly deftly. It feels like a novel that is first and foremost about someone going through a real crisis, not like a magical mystery tour of Australian Literature with a story tacked on to it. We do get to identify with Kate, despite all the bells and whistles.