Try our new book recommendation quiz to get recommendations tailored to your preferences.

Summary and Reviews of The Lieutenant by Kate Grenville

The Lieutenant by Kate Grenville

The Lieutenant

by Kate Grenville
  • BookBrowse Review:
  • Critics' Consensus:
  • Readers' Rating:
  • First Published:
  • Sep 8, 2009, 320 pages
  • Paperback:
  • Sep 2010, 320 pages
  • Rate this book

  • Buy This Book

About This Book

Book Summary

Winner of the Christina Stead Prize for Fiction, Kate Grenville's The Lieutenant - a stunning follow-up to her Commonwealth Writers' Prize-winning book, The Secret River, is a gripping story about friendship, self-discovery, and the power of language along the unspoiled shores of 1788 New South Wales.

As a boy, Daniel Rooke was always an outsider. Ridiculed in school and misunderstood by his parents, Daniel could only hope, against all the evidence, that he would one day find his place in life. When he enters the marines and travels to Australia as a lieutenant on the First Fleet, Daniel finally sees his chance for a new beginning.

As his countrymen struggle to control their cargo of convicts and communicate with those who already inhabit the land, Daniel immediately constructs an observatory to chart the stars and begin the scientific work he prays will make him famous. But the place where they have landed will prove far more revelatory than the night sky. Out on his isolated point, Daniel comes to intimately know the local Aborigines, and forges a remarkable connection with one young girl, Tagaran, that will forever change the course of his life. As the strained coexistence between the Englishmen and the native tribes collapses into violence, Daniel is forced to decide between dedication to his work, allegiance to his country, and his protective devotion to Tagaran and her people.

Inspired by the notebooks of astronomer William Dawes, The Lieutenant is a remarkable story about the poignancy and emotional power of a friendship that defies linguistic and cultural barriers, and shows one ordinary man that he is capable of exceptional courage.

Excerpt
The Lieutenant

Daniel Rooke was quiet, moody, a man of few words. He had no memories other than of being an outsider.

At the dame school in Portsmouth they thought him stupid. His first day there was by coincidence his fifth birthday, the third of March 1767. He took his place behind the desk with his mother’s breakfast oatmeal cosy in his stomach and his new jacket on, happy to be joining the world beyond his home.

Mrs Bartholomew showed him a badly executed engraving with the word ‘cat’ underneath. His mother had taught him his letters and he had been reading for a year. He could not work out what Mrs Bartholomew wanted. He sat at his desk, mouth open.

That was the first time he was paddled with Mrs. Bartholomew’s old hairbrush for failing to respond to a question so simple he had not thought to answer it.

He could not become interested in the multiplication tables. While the others chanted through them, impatient for the ...

Please be aware that this discussion guide will contain spoilers!
Reading Group Guide for The Lieutenant by Kate Grenville

  1. The novel begins with Daniel Rooke's childhood during which he is keenly aware of the "misery of being out of step with the world" (p. 5). Talk about your impressions of Rooke as a young boy, finding instances of his experiences as an outsider, and consider how his childhood prepares him for the life ahead of him.

  2. Author Kate Grenville writes with a poet's sensibility, especially apparent in her evocative descriptions of setting throughout the novel.  How does the ocean town of Portsmouth, England, with its shingle shore and soft rain shape the young Rooke?  Is it a place that symbolizes for him a certain time and ...

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Reviews

BookBrowse Review

BookBrowse

The Lieutenant revisits the same period Grenville wrote about in The Secret River (2005), the first years of the Port Jackson penal colony, but this is a more compact, leaner work. Although based on the diaries of William Dawes this is not your typical historical fiction - Grenville is as much, if not more, focused on observing the mind of her protagonist than she is in exploring the vista he beholds. As we inhabit his mind, his moral dilemmas become ours, and we share his isolation. Written with a poet's sensibility, this is an adventure into the nature of language and culture and of how people can connect across seemingly impenetrable barriers...continued

Full Review (601 words)

This review is available to non-members for a limited time. For full access, become a member today.

(Reviewed by First Impressions Reviewers).

Media Reviews

Los Angeles Times - Bill Marx
The Lieutenant compels as a historical novel exploring the sins of Australia's colonial past, an admirable testament to the necessity that the West learn to appreciate rather than condemn the Other. But Grenville's most thrilling achievement is to filter that lesson in social acceptance through the computational consciousness of a man whose head is in the stars.

New York Times - Alison McCulloch
The Lieutenant” is less a story of colonial struggle and encounter than “The Secret River,” and more the richly imagined portrait of a deeply introspective, and quite remarkable, man.

The Telegraph (UK)
Basing her tale on real events and a real historical character, Kate Grenville has brought imagination and compassion to the source of so much of Australia’s retroactive hand-wringing. What distinguishes her portrayal of Aboriginal culture is that for once appreciation, sympathy and admiration get the better of impotent guilt.

The Guardian - Jay Parini
Although based on the diaries of William Dawes, an English officer who travelled with a fleet bringing the first convicts to Australia in 1888, The Lieutenant should not be mistaken for history, as Grenville warns us in a detailed author's note. She has repossessed history here, transmogrifying what she has found. She occupies the mind of Rooke with a kind of vivid insistence, and his isolation - and moral dilemmas - become ours.

The Independent - Katy Guest
Between the words and among them, this is a profoundly uplifting novel – one that leaves you understanding Rooke's premise: that "Truth [needs] hundreds of words, or none."

The Age (Australia)
[The Lieutenant] glows with life: imaginative in its re-creations, respectful of what cannot be imagined, and thoughtful in its interrogation of the past. ... Grenville's most intellectually sophisticated novel to date.

Sydney Morning Herald - Andrew Rimmer
When Rooke's and Tagaran's explorations of language flower into a relationship - half playful, half amorous - Grenville starts taking considerable risks. This kind of material bristles with opportunities for mawkishness. The coolness of Grenville's prose ensures, however, that matters do not get out of hand. This section of the novel is tender and touching and greatly enhanced by understatement....The other sections of The Lieutenant are, perhaps, a shade more predictable. But Grenville reveals throughout a highly professional writer's sureness of touch. ... I found much to enjoy and to admire in this relatively brief novel.

Library Journal
Starred Review. Grenville displays a graceful touch with the characters and the history that so clearly move her, and her writing sparkles with life. Highly recommended for readers of literary fiction.

Kirkus Reviews
... The narrative focuses on the meditative inner life of its main character; too many other possibilities are unexplored ... An involving, affecting novel that should have been even better.

Publishers Weekly
Grenville's storytelling shines: the backdrop is lush and Daniel is a wonderful creation—a conflicted, curious and endearing eccentric.

Reader Reviews

Cloggie Downunder

A moving Aussie tale
Kate Grenville’s latest novel, “The Lieutenant” is a beautifully crafted work. The Lieutenant in question, Daniel Rooke, is based on William Dawes, a soldier in His Majesty’s Marine Force on the First Fleet which arrived in Sydney Cove in 1788. Dawes...   Read More
Susan

The Lieutenant by Kate Grenville
This book is a great read. Kate Grenville writes with a prose of words that become a visual and mental picture. The historical background adds a new dimension to a story you may think you know. Questions of culture and morality left me thinking ...   Read More
Sally

The Lieutenant by Kate Grenville
A quiet, thought provoking book that was so well written and interesting. A story based loosely on a William Dawes. The Lieutenant is the story of a young man that never quite belonged as he was a genius and maybe autistic. I found him shy, naive, ...   Read More
Ruth Harris

The Lieutenant
Kate Grenville does an excellent job of writing in a 1800's Englishman's voice. Daniel Rooke and others travel from England to New South Wales. Daniel, a student of math, astronomy and languages, goes to study weather and the nighttime skies. Though ...   Read More

Write your own review!

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Beyond the Book



The Australian Penal Colonies

You might wonder why Britain would choose to send ships filled with convicts and their jailors to, quite literally, the other side of the world.  The answer is simple economics.

In the 1780s, the British population was increasing fast, as were the effects of the Industrial Revolution which led to the displacement of a great many people who, without land, rights or jobs, were reduced to stealing. 

Meanwhile, Britain, having lost the American Colonies, was on the lookout for new land to colonize.  The east coast of Australia, charted by The Endeavor in 1770, looked like it had potential.  So it was decided that instead of using slaves, the infrastructure of the new colony would be built with convict labor -...

This "beyond the book" feature is available to non-members for a limited time. Join today for full access.

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Read-Alikes

Read-Alikes Full readalike results are for members only

If you liked The Lieutenant, try these:

  • The Exiles jacket

    The Exiles

    by Christina Baker Kline

    Published 2021

    About this book

    More by this author

    The author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Orphan Train returns with an ambitious, emotionally resonant historical novel that captures the hardship, oppression, opportunity and hope of a trio of women's lives - two English convicts and an orphaned Aboriginal girl - in nineteenth-century Australia.

  • The Other Side of the World jacket

    The Other Side of the World

    by Stephanie Bishop

    Published 2017

    About this book

    In the tradition of The Hours and Revolutionary Road comes a novel set in the 1960s about marriage, motherhood, identity, nostalgia, and the fantasy of home.

We have 6 read-alikes for The Lieutenant, but non-members are limited to two results. To see the complete list of this book's read-alikes, you need to be a member.
More books by Kate Grenville
Search read-alikes
How we choose read-alikes
Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Top Picks

  • Book Jacket: Model Home
    Model Home
    by Rivers Solomon
    Rivers Solomon's novel Model Home opens with a chilling and mesmerizing line: "Maybe my mother is ...
  • Book Jacket: The Mighty Red
    The Mighty Red
    by Louise Erdrich
    Permit me to break the fourth wall. Like any good reviewer, I aim to analyze a book dispassionately,...
  • Book Jacket: The Palace of Eros
    The Palace of Eros
    by Caro De Robertis
    When male suitors intended for her older sisters spread a rumor that Psyche's beauty surpasses that ...
  • Book Jacket: Rejection
    Rejection
    by Tony Tulathimutte
    A young man identifying as a feminist tumbles down the incel rabbit hole after a lifetime of sexual ...

Members Recommend

  • Book Jacket

    In the Garden of Monsters
    by Crystal King

    A woman with no past, a man who knows her, and a monstrous garden that separates their worlds.

  • Book Jacket

    The Bog Wife
    by Kay Chronister

    Five West Virginia siblings unearth secrets after the rupture of a supernatural bargain tying their fate to their land.

Book Club Giveaway!
Win Let Us Descend

Let Us Descend by Jesmyn Ward

Jesmyn Ward imagines the life of an enslaved girl in the years before the Civil War in this instant classic.

Enter

Wordplay

Solve this clue:

J O the B

and be entered to win..