Winner of the Commonwealth PrizeNew York Times Book Review—Notable Fiction 2002Entertainment Weekly—Best Fiction of 2002Los Angeles Times Book Review—Best of the Best 2002Washington Post Book World—Raves 2002Chicago Tribune—Favorite Books of 2002Christian Science Monitor—Best Books 2002Publishers Weekly—Best Books of 2002The Cleveland Plain Dealer—Year’s Best BooksMinneapolis Star Tribune—Standout Books of 2002Once 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.
