num_pages: 404
description: Once 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.
language: English
title: Gould's Book of Fish: A Novel in Twelve Fish
titlecomplete: Gould's Book of Fish: A Novel in Twelve Fish
genres: Fiction, Unfinished, Contemporary, Tasmania, Historical, Historical Fiction, Literary Fiction, Literature, Australia, Novels
ratings_count: 5291
places: Tasmania
awards: awardedAt: 1009872000000
name: Miles Franklin Literary Award, awardedAt: 1009872000000
name: Victorian Premier's Literary Award
category: Vance Palmer Prize for Fiction, awardedAt: 1009872000000
name: Australian Literature Society Gold Medal, awardedAt: 1009872000000
name: Commonwealth Writers' Prize
category: Best Book Overall, awardedAt: 1009872000000
name: ALS Gold Medal
publisher: Grove