| The Grisly Wife | |
| Author: | Rodney Hall |
| Country: | Australia |
| Language: | English |
| Genre: | Novel |
| Publisher: | Macmillan, Australia |
| Release Date: | 1993 |
| Media Type: | Paperback |
| Pages: | 261 |
| Isbn: | 0-7329-0776-4 |
| Oclc: | 29841439 |
| Preceded By: | The Second Bridegroom |
| Followed By: | The Island in the Mind |
The Grisly Wife is a 1993 Miles Franklin literary award-winning novel by the Australian author Rodney Hall.[1]
The Miles Franklin Award Judges' Report called it "a novel with a rather surprising vision."[2]
This novel is the second book in The Yandilli Trilogy (also referred to as A Dream More Luminous Than Love), though the third to be published, following the novels Captivity Captive in 1988, and The Second Bridegroom in 1991.
Catherine Byrne marries self-proclaimed prophet Muley Moloch and leaves 19th-century England with him and his eight female disciples to search for paradise on earth in the wilds of Australia. But things do not work out as planned, as a shipwreck, illness and death cause the small group to fracture.
Jeff Doyle in The Canberra Times noted: "Hall is not so basic nor simplistic to provide a kind of allegorical reading of these issues under his stories. No, such a naive, perhaps crassly simple, view is the job of a reviewer bent on hinting at the multiple ideas running through the book."[3]