In Tasmania - Softcover

Shakespeare, Nicholas

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0099466082 ISBN 13: 9780099466086

Publisher: Vintage Books, 2005

Synopsis

The author first went to Tasmania having heard of the island’s exceptional beauty, and because it was famously remote. He soon decided that it was where he wanted to live. Shakespeare explores the island’s colourful history, inhabitants and ancestors, among whom he discovers some of his own.

About this title

From the Publisher:

The settlement of Tasmania by Europeans began two hundred year 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 colorful—Anthony Fenn Kemp, the so-called "Father of Tasmania." On his mother's side, too, Shakespeare found he had two 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 playing 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 the Author:

Nicholas Shakespeare was born in 1957. The son of a diplomat, much of his youth was spent in the Far East and South America. His novels have been translated into twenty languages. They include The Vision of Elena Silves, winner of the Somerset Maugham Award, Snowleg and The Dancer Upstairs, which was chosen by the American Libraries Association in 1997 as the year's best novel, and in 2001 was made into a film of the same name by John Malkovich. His most recent novel is Secrets of the Sea. He is married with two small boys and currently lives in Oxford.

About this edition

• Publisher: Vintage Books
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 0099466082
• ISBN 13: 9780099466086
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 288