The Drowner
by Robert Drewe
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Description
In the warm alkaline waters of the public bath a headstrong young engineer accidentally collides with a beautiful actress. From this innocent collision of flesh begins a passion that takes them from the Wiltshire Downs to the most elemental choices of life and death in the Australian desert. Their intense romance is but part of the daring story that unfolds. Mingling history, myth and technology with a modern cinematic and poetic imagination, Robert Drewe presents a fable of European show more ambitions in an alien landscape, and a magnificently sustained metaphor of water as the life-and-death force. show lessTags
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Member Reviews
Interesting book, not the least because I live where some of it is set. Quite beatiful story of a young engineer, his love for an actress and the building of the Goldfields water pipeline that brought water to the parched goldfields at Kalgoorlie just over 100 years ago. Full of odd bits of information. The style didn't quite gell with me, as it is written in vignettes of no more that three pages requiring the reader to place them into the structure of the the story, as if doing a jigsaw. It's an interesting technique but I found it rather distancing. However it's still a really interesting book and worth reading, particularly if you have an interest in Western Australia...
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Author Information
32+ Works 1,861 Members
Robert Drewe was born in Melbourne, Australia in 1943. He grew up and was educated in Western Australia where he took up journalism with the West Australian in 1961. He was the literary editor for the Australian from 1971 to 1974. He won the Walkley Award (Australia's highest such award) twice for journalism in 1976 and 1981. Drewe's novel, The show more Drowner was shortlisted for the 1997 Miles Franklin Award. It also made Australian literary history by becoming the first novel to win the Premier's Literary Prize in every state. It also won the Australian Book of the Year Prize, the Adelaide Festival Prize for literature and was voted one of the ten best international novels of the decade. Other books by Drewe were also prize winners: Fortune won the National Book Council fiction prize in Australia. One of his anthologies, The Bay of Contented Men, won a Commonwealth Writers' Prize, while another, the bestseller The Bodysurfers, has been adapted for film, television, radio and stage. Robert Drewe is also a film critic, playwright and the author of several screenplays. His stage drama, South American Barbecue, was first performed in 1991. In 2015 he will be awarded a State Living Treasures Award by the Western Australian state government. The award is given to `highly regarded and skilled¿ career artists who have worked within or created work about Western Australia, passed on their knowledge to other artists, and demonstrated a commitment or contribution to the Western Australian arts sector. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
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Awards and Honors
Awards
Common Knowledge
- Original publication date
- 1996
- Important places
- Australia; Western Australia, Australia
- First words
- They met first in the bath.
- Last words
- (Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)Coolness is a characteristic of water.
Classifications
Statistics
- Members
- 184
- Popularity
- 177,290
- Reviews
- 1
- Rating
- (3.58)
- Languages
- English
- Media
- Paper, Audiobook, Ebook
- ISBNs
- 17
- ASINs
- 2
