Gould's Book of Fish

Winner of the Commonwealth PrizeNew York Times Book Review - Notable Fiction 2002Entertainment Weekly - Best Fiction of 2002Los Angeles Times Book Review - Best of the Best 2002Washington Post Book World - Raves 2002Chicago Tribune - Favorite Books of 2002Christian Science Monitor - Best Books 2002Publishers Weekly - Best Books of 2002The Cleveland Plain Dealer - Year's Best BooksMinneapolis Star Tribune - Standout Books of 2002Once upon a time, when the earth was still young, before the fish in the sea and all the living things on land began to be destroyed, a man named William Buelow Gould was sentenced to life imprisonment at the most feared penal colony in the British Empire, and there ordered to paint a book of fish. He fell in love with the black mistress of the warder and discovered too late that to love is not safe; he attempted to keep a record of the strange reality he saw in prison, only to realize that history is not written by those who are ruled.Acclaimed as a masterpiece around the world, Gould's Book of Fish is at once a marvelously imagined epic of nineteenth-century Australia and a contemporary fable, a tale of horror, and a celebration of love, all transformed by a convict painter into pictures of fish.