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© 2021 V&R unipress, Brill Deutschland GmbH ISBN Print: 9783847113232 – ISBN E-Lib: 9783737013239 reckonwiththepast.AlthoughThornhill tellshisdaughterto“never lookback”, Sarah chooses to bear witness, accept, and confess. The novel resonates with contemporarydebatesconcerningracerelationsandthemoral legitimacyof the modernAustraliannationthroughpositioningof itscentralprotagonist.Itmight alsobesaidthatSarahThornhill isabookwell-suitedtobookclubs.Plot-driven, historical family romance featuring a ‘secret’history, a smart and independent womanprotagonist,withanopenendingthat leavesthereaderwiththepromise of moral redemption, Sarah Thornhill is the kind of storytelling that actively encourages thereader to identifywithcharactersandscenarios. It isalsoabook that reflects the contemporary zeitgeist for traumanarrative.9 In2013/14,weconductedthreefocusgroupswithbookclubsinAustralia: two inthe largesoutherncityofMelbourne,Victoria, andathird inasmall regional town in Tasmania. The groups were recruited through notices placed in the regularnewsletterof theCollegeAdultEducation(CAE)BookClubprogram(the largest—and ostensibly the oldest—book club program in Australia), and through thedatabaseofbookclubs thatwehavebeendeveloping since2011. In total,26people(all exceptonewerewomen)participated inthe focusgroups. In Melbourne, the first grouphad fivemembersandthesecond12; theTasmanian group hadnine participants.Mostmemberswere in theirmiddle age (14 par- ticipantswere 51–60 years old).Members of theMelbourne groupsweremore highly educated, all with auniversity degree, andninewith apostgraduate de- gree.TheTasmaniangrouphad fourmemberswithhighschoolattainmentand five with a degree.We have reported elsewhere on the protocols of our focus groups.10 In brief, the groups included Sarah Thornhill within their reading schedule.When the groupmet todiscuss thebook,weaudio-visually recorded themeeting(DG)andimmediatelyfollowingweconductedthefocusgroup(FG). Thetranscripts fromall threesessionswere thenanalyzedusingNVivosoftware and thematic content analysis. From this analysis, two themes emerged in the groups’ readings of Sarah Thornhill—authenticity and self-reflexivity—that reflect how readers used the text to engagewith themoral questions that this bookexplores. Considerations of authenticity included readers’ scrutiny of whether char- acters and their actionswere believable in the context of the novel’s historical period, andwhether or not the plotwas plausible. Readers’ reflections onhis- torical facts and fictions held in tension both a critique of truth claims, and a willingness to accept the provisional nature of such knowledge. Our readers recognized that truth claims areoften complex and incomplete. They accepted thestoryas ‘astory’(fiction),yetalsoimaginedandproposedtentativeaccounts 9 SeeWhitehead2004;Fassin/Rechtman2009. 10 SeeClarke/Nolan2014;Nolan/Clarke2014. ReadingFiction,TalkingReconciliation 235 Open-Access-Publikation im Sinne der CC-Lizenz BY 4.0