The Country Schoolmaster : A Mystery in 88 Letters

Author: Kate Grenville

True stories: discovery / historical / scientific

Published on 22 October 2026 by Canongate Books in the United Kingdom.

Paperback | 256 pages
198 x 128 x 18 | 176g

FROM THE WOMEN'S PRIZE-WINNING, BOOKER-SHORTLISTED AUTHOR'One of Australia's finest writers' Daily Telegraph 'Grenville inhabits characters with a rare completeness' Jay Parini'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? Or was he the victim of a small-town vendetta? And what went so terribly wrong between him and his daughter?Grenville simply has to know: was Connor a victim, or a villain? Part colonial cold case, part dance of a writer's imagination, The Country Schoolmaster is a book like no other. In it, the novelist comes to understand the seductive pleasure of story-making, but also its dangerous limitations.