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Kate Grenville - Dark Places (Albion's Story)
 

Dark Places (Albion's Story in the US) was published in 1994.   It takes up the story of Lilian from the earlier novel Lilian's Story, but this time tells the story from her father's point of view.  It's a very different version of events.  In Albion's eyes, Lilian is a kind of parody of himself in female form: she shares his brain and his spirit, but she comes wrapped in the mystery of female flesh.  For a man who grew up in the stifling and warping conventions of Edwardian masculinity, this is profoundly disturbing, and  his disturbance finally takes a terrible form.  In joining himself - literally - with the repressed female within himself, he seems to triumph, but in the end the triumph belongs to his daughter. 

 

Dark Places was nominated for the Booker Prize in 1996 and  won the Victorian Premier's Literary Prize for fiction in 1995. 

 

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