About the Book: Country School Master
I stood there holding the hundred-year-old letter with a feeling that was
familiar from other archives, other bulging files of dog-eared paper. It was a
blood-running-fast, itchy-palm, eyes-wide-open feeling of stumbling on
something. A story . . .Rummaging around in the Archives one afternoon, Kate
Grenville comes across an innocuous-looking file of letters about a
schoolteacher in New South Wales. Intrigued, she keeps reading-and discovers a
tale far more curious and complex than she ever could have imagined.
Contradictory perspectives on Joseph Connor are everywhere, and many of them
eerily sinister. Was he savagely beating the students in his care?