Sarah Thornhill, by Kate Grenville

America isn’t the only country with a complex colonial and racial past.  Australia, settled in part by deported prisoners from England, and which had a darker indigenous population, has similar problems that are reflected in its literature.  This book is the final chapter of a trilogy, and I have not read the first two installments of the fictional history of the Thornhill family.  Sarah is the youngest daughter of a wealthy landowner , William Thornhill, an “old colonist” (a euphemism for his convict past).  Her first love is for Jack Langland, a mixed race boy.  How this early relationship, and her family’s hidden, ugly past, shape the illiterate Sarah’s life is the subject of the novel.  An interesting read for an American.  352 pp.