By the author of Schlinder's List and Woman of the Inner Sea

The time is the start of the century. The place is a seemingly peaceful Australian town on the banks of the Macleay River in New South Wales. Here Tim Shea has come from distant Ireland to build a new life free of the crippling poverty and bleak horizons of the past. But he finds that this land of opportunity is a land of perilous choices. As a good man in a less than perfect world, he also finds that the price of goodness can be painfully high.

Thomas Keneally has created one of the most wonderfully realized characters in modern fiction, forced to confront questions of duty and desire, race and sex, class and caste, politics and religion, in a town that becomes a vividly moving microcosm of humanity's strengths and weaknesses, tragedies and triumphs. A River Town is engrossing, funny, and touching - vintage Keneally.

"A novel of a time with moral question disturbingly like our own . . . a fictional world at once harsh and sensuous and supremely engaging to read about." - Boston Globe

"A wonderful piece of writing, a joyously exact and haunting feat of the imagination . . . crammed with magnificent portraits . . . A River Town turns steadily into a chilling and suspenseful mystery, as absorbing a page-turner as this master story-teller has ever written . . . It is the best book of the year." - San Francisco Chronicle