Hester Finch's comfortable life in Chichester, England, could not be further from the hardship her family endured on leaving Adelaide for Salt Creek in 1855. Yet she finds her thoughts drawn to that beautiful, inhospitable outcrop of South Australia and the connections she and her siblings forged there: encounters with passing travellers and the local indigenous people - in particular a boy, Tully, whom Hester's father seeks to educate almost as his own son - would change the fates of the Finches, and of the area's first people, for ever.

Prizes

Winner of Dobbie Award (Australia).,Winner of ABIA New Writer of the Year (Australia).,Winner of Debut Fiction Indie Book Awards (Australia).,Runner-up for Readings Prize for New Australian Fiction (Australia).,Runner-up for Miles Franklin Award (Australia).,Runner-up for Walter Scott Prize (UK).,Long-listed for International Dublin Literary Award (Ireland).

'This is another brilliant and absorbing addition to the recent crop of exceptionally fine historical novels exploring the Australian pioneer experience and is very highly recommended.' Historical Novels Review Magazine; 'Refigures the historical novel ... Salt Creek introduces a capacious new talent' The Australian; 'Written with a profound respect for history: with an understanding that beyond a certain point, the past and its people are unknowable.' Sydney Morning Herald; '[A] deeply moving story about love and rejection as much as it is about the impact of European settlement and the destruction of Indigenous culture.' Sunday Age; 'A haunting story, beautifully written and quietly subversive. It's a spectacular debut.' ANZ Lit Lovers; 'Salt Creek is a novel alive with character, history and poetry, leading us with careful understatement into the unfamiliar world of the Coorong region of Southern Australia.' The judges of the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction

Lucy Treloar was born in Malaysia and educated in Melbourne, England and Sweden, and worked for several years in Cambodia. Awards for her writing include the 2014 Commonwealth Short Story Prize (Pacific Region). Salt Creek is her first novel. Lucy lives in Melbourne with her husband, four children and two whippets.