'International recognition was accorded to Lucy Treloar for her first novel, Salt Creek (2015), when it was short-listed for the 2016 Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction. (Hannah Kent was the second Australian author to be short-listed, in the next year, for her novel The Good People). Thus Treloar was placed in the nominal company of the great writer who invented the historical novel and whose literary influence—at least in the nineteenth century—surpassed all others.' (Introduction)