Shortlisted, Festival of Literature Award for an Unpublished Manuscript by a South Australian emerging writer

Hill of Grace

Stephen Orr

PB 352 PP 230 x 150 1862546487 $27.95 Fiction EAN 9781862546486 Wakefield Press November 2004

‘His prose lovingly packed with particulars, Orr’s characters assume poignant life as modernity and old-time religion go head to head in a wonderful period portrait.’ – Cath Kenneally

1951. Among the coppiced carob trees and arum lilies of the Barossa Valley, old-school Lutheran William Miller lives a quiet life with his wife, Bluma, and son Nathan, making wine and baking bread. But William has a secret. He’s been studying the Bible and he’s found what a thousand others couldn’t: the date of the Apocalypse.

William sets out to convince his neighbours that they need to join him in preparation for the End. The locals of Tanunda become divided. Did William really hear God’s voice on the Hill of Grace? Or is he really deluded? The greatest test of all for William is whether Bluma and Nathan will support him. As the seasons pass in the Valley, as the vines flower and fruit and lose their leaves, William himself is forced to question his own beliefs and the price he’s willing to pay for them.

The Barossa Valley of the 1950s is beautifully captured in this, Stephen Orr’s second novel. His first novel, Attempts to Draw Jesus, was a runner up in the 2000 Vogel Award and published by Allen & Unwin.

‘Hill of Grace tackles the obstacle of an author’s second novel with aplomb. Orr’s book contains a broad but unobtrusive social history besides an intelligent, unhurried and incisive plumbing of kinds of intense, but very different yearning.’ – Bulletin

‘Orr’s first novel, Attempts to Draw Jesus, was hailed for its “clarity and real grace”. The same qualities shine again, along with a mature eye for irony, a great ease with all his large cast of characters and a deep sense of poignancy of eroding lifestyles and generational change. Orr’s eye for detail is astute and poetic, and there’s a rich vein of humour enlivening what might have been a sombre tale. On of my favourite books this year.’ – Cath Kenneally, Weekend Australian