{"product_id":"2026100009224-secondhand-the-idea-of-perfection","title":"The Idea Of Perfection","description":"\u003cp\u003eEdition: true first aus ed\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eCondition remarks:\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBook: Very good\u003cbr\u003eJacket: No dust jacket\u003cbr\u003ePages: Good\u003cbr\u003eCondition remarks: Condition as shown in image\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn a sun-bleached outback town where nothing ever seems to change, two awkward, self-conscious outsiders are thrown together by the most unlikely of circumstances — the proposed demolition of a crooked wooden bridge. The Idea of Perfection is a warmly comic and deeply humane love story by one of Australia's most celebrated literary voices, Kate Grenville, chronicling the tentative romance between Harley Savage, a no-nonsense engineer sent to tear down the old bridge, and Douglas Cheeseman, a diffident and socially clumsy museum curator dispatched to preserve the town's heritage. Set against the dusty, sun-drenched landscape of rural New South Wales, the novel presents two deeply imperfect people slowly, painfully, and hilariously finding their way toward each other.\n\nGrenville writes with a rare combination of wit, tenderness, and psychological precision, illuminating the ways in which human beings construct and cling to their ideas of perfection — in themselves, in others, and in the world around them. Winner of the prestigious Orange Prize for Fiction in 2001, the novel stands as a landmark of contemporary Australian literature, celebrated for its sharp observational humour and its quietly radical insistence that love, in all its stumbling imperfection, is worth pursuing. Readers who cherish character-driven fiction with genuine emotional depth will find this novel impossible to put down — and even harder to forget.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Secondhand Stock","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":49269348434139,"sku":"2026100009224-SECONDHAND","price":120.0,"currency_code":"AUD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0523\/7646\/9701\/files\/90ddf151-858d-4213-878d-9fdfd3d80b26.png?v=1788999089","url":"https:\/\/bookgrocer.com\/products\/2026100009224-secondhand-the-idea-of-perfection","provider":"Book Grocer","version":"1.0","type":"link"}