AustLit

'The ‘social realist novel’ that Robert Drewe quite deliberately set out to write with Grace could have sunk under the weight of its own ideas, were it not for the thriller foil the story is wrapped in. Grace Molloy, the protagonist, is on the run from a crazed erotomanic stalker, whom she refers to as ‘the Icelander’. Grace is the daughter of an anthropologist, and named after the famous discovery that her father John Molloy made of ‘the first modern woman’, a skeleton he named ‘Grace’ for its ‘gracile’ form. This isn’t just a thriller; Drewe is musing over the birth of humanity itself, and the movement of people across the earth. He poses complex questions that don’t arrive at answers, but in a culture that often hides behind euphemisms – that refugees are ‘boat people’, for example – and is still struggling to come to terms with ideas of belonging, just to pose the questions has power.' (Introduction)

'In an article entitled 'Minimal Selves,' Stuart Hall suggests that 'identity' is formed at the unstable point where the 'unspeakable' stories of subjectivity meet the narratives of history, of a culture.' This essay is an attempt to explore just such an articulation of identity, as it crystallizes at the boundary between the private and the public in one of Robert Drewe's most recent novels, Grace (2005)...' (From author's introduction 231)