One Life: My Mother’s Story

When Kate Grenville’s mother died she left behind many fragments of memoir. These were the starting point for One Life, the story of a woman whose life spanned a century of tumult and change. In many ways Nance’s story echoes that of many mothers and grandmothers, for whom the spectacular shifts of the twentieth century offered a path to new freedoms and choices. In other ways Nance was exceptional. In an era when women were expected to have no ambitions beyond the domestic, she ran successful businesses as a registered pharmacist, laid the bricks for the family home, and discovered her husband’s secret life as a revolutionary. One Life is an act of great imaginative sympathy, a daughter’s intimate account of the patterns in her mother’s life. It is a deeply moving homage by one of Australia’s finest writers.

Reviews of One Life: My Mother’s Story

* Kate Grenville is one of Australia's finest writers … her great skill as a writer is to take the barest of biographical details and spin them into something of intricate moral complexity Telegraph * Grenville inhabits characters with a rare completeness … She writes with a poet's sense of rhythm and imagery Guardian * Grenville has emerged not only as the truth-teller but also something of a hero … her novels are important quests that go beyond art Irish Times