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  • Published: 30 April 2018
  • ISBN: 9781742537856
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 512

The Making of Martin Sparrow




A devastating flood on the Hawkesbury almost wipes out the young colony, bringing to the surface many secrets and desires in this masterpiece of historical fiction

Sparrow is a terrific fictional creation. There is wit and wisdom to be had in the book. Following the frontier, and beyond, is precisely the direction the novel takes.
AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

Martin Sparrow is already struggling when the Hawkesbury’s great flood of March 1806 lays waste to him and his farm.

Luckless, lovelorn and deep in debt, the ex-convict is confronted with a choice. He can buckle down and set about his agricultural recovery, or he can heed the whispers of an earthly paradise on the far side of the mountains – a place where men are truly free – and strike out for a new life. But what chance of renewal is there for a man like Sparrow in either the brutal colony or the forbidding wilderness?

The decision he makes triggers a harrowing chain of events and draws in a cast of extraordinary characters, including Alister Mackie, the chief constable on the river; his deputy, Thaddeus Cuff; the vicious hunter, Griffin Pinney; the Romany girl, Bea Faa; and the young Aboriginal men, Caleb and Moowut’tin, caught between war and peace.

Set against the awe-inspiring immensity of the hinterland west of the Hawkesbury River, this epic of chance and endurance is an immersion into another time, a masterpiece of language and atmosphere. Rich, raw, strangely beautiful and utterly convincing, The Making of Martin Sparrow reveals Peter Cochrane – already one of our leading historians – as one of our most compelling novelists.

  • Published: 30 April 2018
  • ISBN: 9781742537856
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 512

About the author

Peter Cochrane

Peter Cochrane is a widely published historian and writer based in Sydney. He is best known for his book Colonial Ambition: Foundations of Australian Democracy, which won the inaugural Prime Minister’s Prize for Australian History and the Age Book of the Year in 2007. His first venture into fiction was the novella Governor Bligh and the Short Man. He is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities.

Also by Peter Cochrane

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Praise for The Making of Martin Sparrow

Brilliant debut. Sparrow is a terrific fictional creation. There is wit and wisdom to be had in the book. Following the frontier, and beyond, is precisely the direction the novel takes ... It is here, too, that Cochrane employs some of his finest writing, embarking upon perfectly modulated descriptive riffs that betray an appropriate sense of awe and developing understanding for what is a vast, ancient, storied landscape - a terrific accompaniment to the pitch-perfect dialogue and deep characterisation found in this fine novel.

David Whish-Wilson, Australian Book Review

Serious reflections and a good deal of grim humour are built into a well-paced narrative and rich description of both landscape and character in this impressive novel.

Dennis Haskell, The Sydney Morning Herald

The Making of ­Martin Sparrow is at once harrowing and entertaining, unsettling our expectations as it ­constructs yet another version of those convict times that seem always to stand up to another imaginative return.

Peter Pierce, The Australian

Written in a wonderfully evocative, muscular prose and rich in Biblical cadences, Martin Sparrow just might be Australia's answer to the novels of Cormac McCarthy.

Chris Saliba, Books+Publishing

The story moves back and forth between Sparrow and the constables – ambitious but not unfair martinet Mackie and equable, entertaining, insightful Thaddeus Cuff – to draw an utterly persuasive and atmospheric picture of a frontier society struggling with an overlay of violence and depravity, particularly towards women and the local Aboriginal population, who are making their own accommodations to the forced changes to their existence. The novel is full of memorable personalities (with terrible names) but they pale in comparison with the overarching authority of bush and weather, made luminous by the personal experience of the author, and with the hauntingly equivocal coda with which the book ends.

Katharine England, SA Review

Unsurprisingly, given Cochrane's position as a historian, the novel is well researched and brings vividly to life the danger, dirt, and darkness of the period. The smell of death and decay hangs over the events of the novel which paints the Australian frontier as uncompromising and unwelcoming.

Simon Clark, The AU Review

The Making of Martin Sparrow is a book well worth the reading. Its language, the accuracy of its depiction of life in the colony, the tension created by Martin’s escape and its consequences all contribute to an excellent historical novel.

Ian Lipke, Queensland Reviewers Collective

This deeply impressive novel brilliantly evokes the bleak, brutal world of early colonial life. In authentic, compelling prose and distinctive, convincing dialogue, it provides a nuanced and disturbing view of the brutal reality of our nation’s origins.

Jo Dyer, MUD Literary Prize

Awards & recognition

MUD Literary Prize

Shortlisted  •  2019  •  MUD Literary Prize