The Lieutenant (Canons) - Softcover

"A triumph. Read it at once" (The Times)

"In lucid prose and perfectly measured strides, Grenville lays down her riveting tale. A novel aglow with empathy, its author's capacious visions still deliver an elemental thrill" (Daily Mail 2009-01-30)

"A beautifully uplifting piece of fiction" (Independent)

"An original, inviting tale" (Daily Telegraph)

"Genuinely affecting" (Financial Times)

"Grenville's prose is clear and clean, employing a gently leading storytelling style that is especially welcome with a foreign land and a foreign time . . . Grenville has brought imagination and compassion to the source of so much of Australia's retroactive hand-wringing. What distinguishes her portrayal of Aboriginal culture is that for once appreciation, sympathy and admiration get the better of impotent guilt" (Lionel Shriver Daily Telegraph)

"Grenville inhabits characters with a rare completeness . . . writes with a poet's sense of rhythm and imagery . . . [and] explores the natural rifts that arise between settlers and native people with a deep understanding of the ambiguities inherent in such conflicts" (Jay Parini Guardian)

"A deft historical tale of discovery . . . [Dawes'] qualities shine lambently through Grenville's elegantly calibrated prose . . . The lasting impression of her novel is not of drama, but of a lovely, watchful stillness: a sort of astronomy of the human heart" (Sunday Telegraph 2009-01-25)

"A compelling narrative . . . An intelligent, spare, always engrossing imagining of first contact, in which the fictionalisation of history allows a comment about current postcolonial race relationships which escapes the didacticism of special pleading" (Times Literary Supplement 2009-01-30)

"In this novel, morally troubling issues of exploitation and hypocrisy carry reverberations well beyond the convincingly portrayed historical moment" (Sunday Telegraph)