A life of petty crime and poverty on the streets of 19th-century London sentences William Thornhill—along with his wife and children—to exile in the colonial outpost of Australia. But among the convicts of New South Wales there is a whisper of the possibility of freedom, away from Sydney and up the Hawkesbury River, for those who dare to stake a claim.

In a richly layered epic that recalls such international modern classics as The True History of the Kelly Gang, Kate Grenville tells the heart-wrenching story of a family in exile. Sweeping across the 19th century, from the teeming banks of the Thames in London to the hardscrabble frontier settlement of Sydney, Australia, The Secret River sets us down in an unforgiving land and masterfully confronts us with the brutal price of colonization.