Reaching Tin River - Hardcover

Astley, Thea

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0399135324 ISBN 13: 9780399135323

Publisher: Putnam Adult, 1990

Synopsis

A young Australian woman, the daughter of an American musician, looks back on the people and forces that shaped her life

About this title

From Publishers Weekly:

Flippant, breezy, offhand, the narrative voice of Belle, the 40-ish protagonist of Astley's dazzling new novel, seductively snares the reader in episodic vignettes that record her life. Cheerfully neglected by her scatterbrain mother, a drummer in a two-woman band, Belle, who has never has known her American trumpet-playing father, grows up lonely and bored in the Australian outback. Abortive careers and a failed marriage leave Belle feeling like a permanent outsider. Craving an "emotional center," she becomes obsessed with long-dead archetypal settler Gaden Lockyer, whose photograph she comes across in library archives and whose life she decides to trace. As the narrative tone darkens, Belle veers close to a breakdown as she tries to reenter the past--literally and metaphysically--through a life-size poster of Lockyer, who was, successively, a banker, farmer and crooked politician, and who ended his days in a nursing home in the town of Tin River. The novel closes on a forlorn but hopeful note as Belle, still holding the reader mesmerized, begins to come to terms with her emotional neediness. Few writers can equal Astley ( It's Raining in Mango ) in conveying the physical, social and moral landscape of Australia, or in scattering dazzling imagery on every page. Recently the winner of Australia's Patrick White Award for lifetime achievement in literature, three-time recipient of the Miles Franklin Award, Astley should break through to a wider American audience with this beautifully written novel.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal:

Astley's Australian setting has "a touch of Diane Arbus" that suits her plucky, off-center heroine: sun, white sand, "a racing blue sky under which the whole of Brisbane bakes its prejudices." For Belle, reaching Tin River, "a townlet of terminal attractiveness," means arriving at the end of the line. She has cast off from her eccentric mother and absent father, her unsympathetic husband and unsatisfying work, the whole society with which she is out of sync, only to become adrift in the past. Belle's research into the life of Gaden Locker, whose turn-of-the-century diary hints at mysterious encounters, obsesses her to the point of madness and crack-up at Tin River, scene of Locker's last days. Only her mordant honesty, graced by wit, rescues Belle from cynicism and self-pity. The rustle of her intelligence disturbs every page. Author of the recently published Two by Astley ( LJ 5/15/88), Astley has been honored by the Patrick White and Miles Franklin awards.
- Mary Soete, San Diego P.L., Cal.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Putnam Adult
• Publication date: 1990
• ISBN 10: 0399135324
• ISBN 13: 9780399135323
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 223