From Publishers Weekly
The resilient daughter of a doomed, loveless couple narrates the luminous third novel from Australian Jones (
Sixty Lights). Perdita Keene recalls her childhood as the Australian-born daughter of a British anthropologist and his wife, who come to the outback in 1930 for Perdita's WWI-veteran father Nicholas's fieldwork. Perdita is unwanted, and her mother, Stella, withdraws. Nicholas forces himself sexually on the local Aboriginal women. Among his victims is an orphaned teenager, Mary, who is brought from the local convent to take care of Perdita when Stella is hospitalized. Mary and Perdita develop a close, sisterly relationship as Mary teaches Perdita indigenous wisdom that is a far cry from what Stella and her beloved Shakespeare impart. Nicholas's violence precipitates a tragedy, and the expiation of Perdita's long-held guilt, for her father's crimes among other things, edifies this beautifully composed work.
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Product Description
Sorry is set in the remote outback of Western Australia during World War II, where an English anthropologist and his wife raise a lonely child, Perdita. Her upbringing is far from ordinary: in a shack in the wilderness, with a self-absorbed father burying himself in books and an unstable mother whose obsession with Shakespeare forms the backbone of the girl's limited education.
Emotionally adrift, Perdita becomes friends with a deaf mute boy, Billy, and a forsaken Aboriginal girl, Mary. Perdita and Mary come to call one another sister and to share a profound bond. The three misfit children are content with each other and their life in this distant corner of the world, until a terrible event lays waste to their lives.
Through this compelling story of Perdita's childhood, Gail Jones explores the values of friendship, loyalty and sacrifice with a brilliance that has earned her numerous accolades.