One Life is the story of Nance Russell, whose life spanned a century of tumult and change. In an act of great imaginative sympathy, her daughter Kate Grenville has drawn on the fragments of memoir Nance left, to create an intimate account of the patterns in her mother's life.
In many ways Nance's story echoes that of many mothers and grandmothers, for whom the spectacular shifts of the twentieth century offered a path to new freedoms and choices. In other ways Nance was exceptional. In an era when women were expected to have no ambitions beyond the domestic, she ran successful businesses as a registered pharmacist, laid the bricks for the family home, and discovered her husband's secret life as a revolutionary.
One Life is a deeply moving homage by one of Australia's finest writers.
- ISBN10 1782116850
- ISBN13 9781782116851
- Publish Date 7 May 2015 (first published 1 April 2015)
- Publish Status Out of Print
- Out of Print 9 May 2017
- Publish Country GB
- Imprint Canongate Books
- Edition Main
- Format Hardcover
- Pages 272
- Language English