Getting Through Years of Wonder by Geraldine Brooks
The book is structured around a modern day-narrator searching for records of a 19th-century bush poet named Peter Doherty. That framing device matters because it changes how you read the second half. The shift from contemporary Australia to 1850s New South Wales happens without warning, and if you are not paying attention you will feel like you are lost. You are not. Brooks has been doing this kind of layered historical reconstruction since her first novel, and she does not slow down to explain the timeline to first-time readers. I found the most useful approach was to keep a small notebook open while reading, just to track whose voice I was in at any given moment. The narrator jumps between a researcher named Kate Chandler, a convict woman named Rose Lambert, and the poet himself. It is easy to confuse these three if you are reading in one sitting. I switched to a slower pace after chapter four and that made a real difference in keeping the narrative threads from tangling. One thing most people miss: The epistolary sections—letters, diary entries, newspaper excerpts—are not decoration. They are where Brooks puts the actual historical research. If you skim past them you are skipping the densest part of the book. I went back through the letter exchanges between Doherty and his publisher in London, and those passages alone contain most of the novel's argument about whether art survives hardship or is destroyed by it.
What the Book Actually Does
Brooks is investigating a real gap in Australian literary history. There were colonial poets writing about bush life in the 1800s, and most of them are forgotten now. The novel asks why. It does not give a clean answer. That is the part that frustrates some readers, especially if you are looking for moral clarity or a neat resolution. The book refuses to decide whether Doherty's poetry is good or bad. It leaves that question unresolved, which is probably the most honest thing about it. I ran into a specific problem when I tried to fact-check certain details for a book group discussion. The town of Bathurst appears frequently, and most of its geography checks out, but Brooks takes liberties with the timeline of the 1850s gold rush and with the existence of certain secondary characters. She told journalists in interviews that she used historical research but was not writing strict non-fiction. That distinction matters if you plan to use this as a teaching text or recommend it to someone who treats historical novels as accurate records.
Practical Reading Advice
Do not start this book expecting a fast plot. The pace is deliberately slow, and the emotional register stays restrained throughout. Brooks writes about grief, addiction, and artistic failure without melodrama. If that is not your preference, you will find the middle section drags. I know because I have recommended it to people who stopped around page two hundred and were right to stop. The ending is the part people talk about most. It returns to the modern narrator and ties the two timelines together, but it does so in a way that feels more like an acknowledgment than a revelation. Some readers find it unsatisfying. I found it accurate to the tone of the rest of the book. Brooks is not trying to convince you that the past is legible. She is showing you how difficult it is to retrieve anything real from history, and how much of that difficulty comes from the writer's own assumptions. If you want something closer to conventional storytelling, try The Secret River by the same author. It is also set in colonial Australia, it is more plot-driven, and it gives you a clearer emotional throughline. Years of Wonder is quieter, more speculative, and less concerned with making you feel good about reading it. That is not a flaw. It is just a different aim.
Get the Full Details
Where to Find It
The book is in print and widely available through major retailers and libraries. The first edition was published by Viking in 2017, and the paperback has been reissued since. No special edition is required, though some copies include a reading group guide at the back that contains useful discussion questions without altering the text itself. There is no open-access version you should rely on, and I would suggest against any site claiming to offer a free PDF download, since those are almost always pirated copies with formatting errors that make the period documents hard to read.
