{"product_id":"2026100009464-secondhand-a-descant-for-gossips","title":"A Descant For Gossips","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eCondition remarks:\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBook: Good\u003cbr\u003eJacket: Worn\/faded, no tears\u003cbr\u003ePages: Yellowed\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn 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.\n\nAstley 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.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Secondhand Stock","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":49203180732635,"sku":"2026100009464-SECONDHAND","price":45.0,"currency_code":"AUD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0523\/7646\/9701\/files\/e9f5cdfd-e734-48ea-8a4b-1f02e89fd571.png?v=1788145027","url":"https:\/\/bookgrocer.com\/products\/2026100009464-secondhand-a-descant-for-gossips","provider":"Book Grocer","version":"1.0","type":"link"}