ONE LIFE

Kate Grenville's mother, Nance, died in 2002. In going through her papers Kate discovered that her mother had had a few tries at writing a memoir, her attempt to understand how her own experiences fitted into the extraordinary social changes that had taken place in her lifetime.

Nance was not a famous person and was only published once, when she wrote a letter to the newspaper. Yet her story, with its emphases on a new world of choice and self-determination, echoes the lives of countless other women. She grew up in the country, trained as a pharmacist, juggled work and family before finding new freedoms towards the end of her life.

ONE LIFE is an act of great imaginative sympathy, the intimate account by a daughter of the patterns in her mother's life. It is an honest and deeply moving homage by one of Australia's greatest living writers.

Kate Grenville is one of Australia's finest writers. Her bestselling novel The Secret River has been published in more than twenty countries. It has received numerous awards, including the Commonwealth Writers' Prize, and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the Miles Franklin Literary Award. The companion memoir, Searching for the Secret River, was released in 2006. The Idea of Perfection won the prestigious Orange Prize for Fiction, and her other novels include Sarah Thornhill, The Lieutenant, Lilian's Story, Dark Places and Joan Makes History.