A Descant For Gossips
Condition: SECONDHAND
This is a secondhand book. The jacket image is a photograph of the exact copy we have in stock. This image shows the condition of this book. Further condition remarks are below.
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: Worn/faded, no tears
Pages: Yellowed
In the cloistered world of a small Queensland town, where conformity is currency and difference is punished with devastating precision, Thea Astley's A Descant for Gossips chronicles the quiet persecution of Vinny, a solitary schoolgirl whose very existence unsettles the community around her. Published in 1960, this debut novel presents a searing portrait of provincial Australian life, where adolescent cruelty and adult indifference conspire to destroy what they cannot understand. The novel's central conflict is a slow, suffocating social siege — gossip as weapon, silence as complicity — rendered with a moral urgency that refuses sentimentality. Astley writes with a scalpel's precision, dissecting the machinery of small-town judgment through prose that is lyrical yet relentlessly clear-eyed. A Miles Franklin Award-winning author of singular distinction, she argues through her fiction that Australia's suburban and rural communities harbour a profound capacity for casual brutality. A Descant for Gossips stands as both a devastating character study and a foundational work in Australian literary tradition — one that leaves the reader asking not just what happened to Vinny, but who among us holds the stone.
Author: Thea Astley
Format: Hardback
Published: 1968, The Jacaranda Press
Genre: Australian history
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: Worn/faded, no tears
Pages: Yellowed
In the cloistered world of a small Queensland town, where conformity is currency and difference is punished with devastating precision, Thea Astley's A Descant for Gossips chronicles the quiet persecution of Vinny, a solitary schoolgirl whose very existence unsettles the community around her. Published in 1960, this debut novel presents a searing portrait of provincial Australian life, where adolescent cruelty and adult indifference conspire to destroy what they cannot understand. The novel's central conflict is a slow, suffocating social siege — gossip as weapon, silence as complicity — rendered with a moral urgency that refuses sentimentality. Astley writes with a scalpel's precision, dissecting the machinery of small-town judgment through prose that is lyrical yet relentlessly clear-eyed. A Miles Franklin Award-winning author of singular distinction, she argues through her fiction that Australia's suburban and rural communities harbour a profound capacity for casual brutality. A Descant for Gossips stands as both a devastating character study and a foundational work in Australian literary tradition — one that leaves the reader asking not just what happened to Vinny, but who among us holds the stone.