The Book of Science and Antiquities

New
Hardcover
2019
$20.42

In a novel of breathtaking reach and inspired imagination, one of Australia's greatest writers tells the stories of two men who have much in common. What separates them is 42,000 years.
Shade lives with his second wife amid their clan on the shores of a bountiful lake. A peaceable man, he knows that when danger threatens, the Hero ancestors will call on him to kill, or sacrifice himself, to save his people.
Over 40,000 years later, Shade's remains are unearthed near the now dry Lake Learned in New South Wales. The sensational discovery fascinates Shelby Apple, a documentary film maker who tracks the controversies it provokes about who the continent's first inhabitants were and where Shade's bones belong.
To Shelby, who will follow his own heroes to the battlefields of Eritrea and the Rift Valley where Homo Sapiens originated, Shade is a messenger from an ancient culture that lived in harmony with the land. And when mortality looms, he becomes a symbol of enduring life.

Synopsis

In a novel of breathtaking reach and inspired imagination, one of Australia's greatest writers tells the stories of two men who have much in common. What separates them is 42,000 years.

Shade lives with his second wife amid their clan on the shores of a bountiful lake. A peaceable man, he knows that when danger threatens, the Hero ancestors will call on him to kill, or sacrifice himself, to save his people.

Over 40,000 years later, Shade's remains are unearthed near the now dry Lake Learned in New South Wales. The sensational discovery fascinates Shelby Apple, a documentary film maker who tracks the controversies it provokes about who the continent's first inhabitants were and where Shade's bones belong.

To Shelby, who will follow his own heroes to the battlefields of Eritrea and the Rift Valley where Homo Sapiens originated, Shade is a messenger from an ancient culture that lived in harmony with the land. And when mortality looms, he becomes a symbol of enduring life.

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More Information

Format: Hardcover
Pages: 336
Publisher: Sceptre
Published: 30 May 2019
ISBN 10: 1529355214
ISBN 13: 9781529355215

Media Reviews

A last meditation on last things, but still electric with life, passion and appetite . . . intensely personal, hugely inventive and often moving novel. -- Geordie Williamson * Australian *
Learned's voice is a wonderful creation: modern, compassionate and filled with moral authority . . . Both perspectives will fascinate Keneally's dedicated followers who have come to expect daring narratives dealing with themes of family, morality and moral responsibility. * Australian Bookseller *
[An] impressive sketch of ghostly affinities between a man who makes images at once artistic and real out of the life he records and shapes, and another who conjures and kills and wills himself on the tightrope of justice and mercy in a time that Keneally is very adept at animating . . . It leaps to Africa, it resounds with the shadow-world of ancient Australia, it can evoke a background of the Inuit, of any damn thing pertinent to the purposes of a master craftsman who has no intention of taking anything lying down. * The Saturday Paper *
[Keneally] steps forth into a wild landscape of evolution, myth and primal emotion . . . a hymn to idealism, and to human development . . . As a portrait of passion, belonging, anger and forgiveness in marriage, in whatever stage of evolution, this book is deeply affecting. * Sydney Morning Herald *

Author Bio

Thomas Keneally began his writing career in 1964 and has published thirty-one novels since. They include Schindler's Ark, which won the Booker Prize in 1982 and was subsequently made into the film Schindler's List, and The Chant Of Jimmie Blacksmith, Confederates and Gossip From The Forest, each of which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. His most recent novels are The Daughters Of Mars, which was shortlisted for the Walter Scott Prize in 2013, and Shame and the Captives. He has also written several works of non-fiction, including his memoir Homebush Boy, Searching for Schindler and Australians. He is married with two daughters and lives in Sydney.