In Tasmania - Hardcover

Shakespeare, Nicholas

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1585677205 ISBN 13: 9781585677207

Publisher: Abrams Press, 2005

Synopsis

The settlement of Tasmania by Europeans began two hundred years ago. Nicholas Shakespeare first went there, having heard of the island’s exceptional beauty, because it was famously remote. He soon decided that this was where he wanted to live. Only later did he discover a cache of letters written by an ancestor as corrupt as he was colorful: Anthony Fenn Kemp, the so-called Father of Tasmania. On his mother’s side, too, Shakespeare found he had unknown Tasmanian relations; a pair of spinsters who had never left their farm except once, in 1947, to buy shoes. Their journal recounted a saga beginning in Northern England in the 1890s with a dashing but profligate ancestor who, having played tennis with the Kaiser, ended his life in disgrace in the Tasmanian bush. In this fascinating history of two turbulent centuries in an apparently idyllic place, Shakespeare effortlessly weaves the history of the island with his multiple stories, a cast of unlikely characters from Errol Flynn to the King of Iceland, a village full of Chatwins, and, inevitably, a family of Shakespeares.

About this title

About the Author:

Nicholas Shakespeare is the author of The Vision of Elena Silves (1989), winner of the Somerset Maugham Award; The High Flyer, which was chosen for the Granta list in 1993; and The Dancer Upstairs, which was the American Libraries Association's Best Novel of 1997 and was made into a film of the same name by John Malkovich. He divides his time between England and Tasmania.

From Booklist:

Seduced by the pristine air and innate beauty of the island, Shakespeare (The Dancer Upstairs, 1997) settled in Tasmania, halfway around the world from England, a place almost synonymous with remote. A chance discovery of a cache of letters unearthed from his paternal grandmother's basement revealed that an ancestor had settled there nearly 200 years earlier, and that man, Anthony Fenn Kemp, a ne'er-do-well but successful heir to a merchant in the drinks trade, was known as the Father of Tasmania. Later, Shakespeare's mother learned that some of her relatives had emigrated to Tasmania, impelling Shakespeare to seek out two spinster sisters, both in their 80s, who lived in the north-west of the island. Shakespeare, prompted by these fortuitous discoveries, has assembled a fascinating and expansive history of the island, from its penal-colony origins, when it was known as Van Diemen's Land, to its present-day status as an Australian state. In between, Shakespeare tells of Kemp; the convict Jorgen Jorgenson, who, briefly, was the king of Iceland; the assimilation of the island's aboriginal population; and the tragic story of Merle Oberon, who claimed to be from exotic Tasmania to hide the fact of her ignoble birth out of wedlock in Calcutta. Benjamin Segedin
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

About this edition

• Publisher: Abrams Press
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 1585677205
• ISBN 13: 9781585677207
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 374