Cirrus@Austlit

This is Albion Gidley Singer at the pen, locked in behind his mahogany, filling the silence around himself with the busy squeak of the nib across the paper. I will begin when I always like to begin, with a fact. Once upon a time, there was a man and his daughter, all was well.

Albion Gidley Singer appears an entirely proper man: husband, father, pillar of the community. But he is a hollow man, and within him are frightened and frightening dark places from which spring loathing and fear of female flesh. And, finally, the kind of violence that might call itself love.

It is through the eyes of Albion Gidley Singer that the world is seen and in his voice that the story is told, and it is a voice that never suffers from self-doubt. He can never know, as the reader does, that his view of the world is grotesquely distorted by his damaged self. Kate Grenville has written a disturbing, shocking and darkly funny novel that resonated in the mind with the truth of great writing. Dark Places is a literary triumph.