Winner of the Commonwealth Prize New York Times Book Review–Notable Fiction 2002

Entertainment Weekly–Best Fiction of 2002

Los Angeles Times Book Review–Best of the Best 2002

Washington Post Book World–Raves 2002

Chicago Tribune–Favorite Books of 2002

Christian Science Monitor–Best Books 2002

Publishers Weekly–Best Books of 2002

The Cleveland Plain Dealer–Year’s Best Books

Minneapolis Star Tribune–Standout Books of 2002

Once 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.