Absolutely wonderful!

Brilliant historical fiction! I learned a lot from this book by reading about the historical basis for what happens in this book. It is clearly very well-researched, and the weaving of historical events with the fictional imagination is superbly executed. The characters are well-developed. The two brothers in Australia debate the enigma of Charles Dickens: on one hand his treatment of his wife,, a woman who bore him 10 children (can you imagine how exhausted she must have been!), well-known, is hard to reconcile with the author who shows so much compassion in his writing for the down-trodden. And then we have the problems of colonialism to consider. There are so many admirable aspects to modern day Australia, but its colonialist history is something to contend with. I would be delighted to listen to a sequel to this book and can only wish that Thomas Keneally stays healthy enough (and would want) to write one. He's a brilliant author and I thank him for the hours of pleasure this book brought me. The narrator was also brilliant - I can't know how accurate his various accents are, but they sound convincing enough, and with different voices for the large number of characters, he was most entertaining. A tiny gripe: I thought he paused too much between sentences.