100,000+ Books, Games & Puzzles in-stock πŸ‡³πŸ‡Ώ

πŸ‰ πŸ”₯ Happy Threshing Day! Pre-order the Deluxe Edition of Rebecca Yarros' newest release today! πŸ”₯ πŸ‰

A Kindness Cup

3.82 goodreads logo

Ratings/reviews counts are updated frequently.

Check link for latest rating.
( 150 ratings, 22 reviews)
Book Hero Magic crafted this summary to help describe this book. While it's new and still learning, it may not be perfect - your feedback is welcome! Summary
A Kindness Cup by Thea Astley, published in 1974, is known for its incisive examination of morality and justice in a small Australian town. The novel did not receive major literary awards upon its release, but Thea Astley herself was a highly acclaimed author, having won the Miles Franklin Award multiple times for other works. On the other hand, Kate Grenville is a renowned author with no direct connection to A Kindness Cup, as she did not collaborate with Astley on this novel. However, both authors have significantly impacted Australian literature with their contributions.
Read More
Format: Paperback / softback
$1799
AVAILABLE WITH SUPPLIER Ships from our Auckland warehouse within 4-6 weeks

Found a better price? Request a price match

Book Hero Magic created this recommendation. While it's new and still learning, it may not be perfect - your feedback is welcome! IS THIS YOUR NEXT READ?

You might appreciate this compelling narrative if you're intrigued by stories that delve into the complexities of human nature and social justice within a small community. It offers a rich exploration of moral dilemmas, historical injustices, and the enduring impact of past events on the present, all woven together in an engaging and thought-provoking manner.

Book Hero thinking about your next read

A man returns to his hometown two decades after a massacre of local Aboriginal people, where former residents have reunited to celebrate the progress and prosperity of their community, to insist that the town confront its dark past.

A woman becomes obsessed with the story of a long-dead colonial pioneer, and her research becomes a way of coming to terms with her own past.

Book Hero Magic formatted this description to make it easier to read. While it's new and still learning, it may not be perfect - your feedback is welcome! Description

I told them to go into the scrub and disperse the tribe.
Disperse? That is a strange word. What do you mean by dispersing?
Firing at them.

Two decades after a massacre of local Aboriginal people, the former residents of a Queensland town have reunited to celebrate the progress and prosperity of their community. Tom Dorahy, returning to his hometown, is having none of it: he wants those responsible to own up to their actions.

A reckoning with oppression, guilt, and the weight of the past, A Kindness Cup is one of Thea Astley’s greatest achievements.

Book Hero Magic summarised reviews for this book. While it's new and still learning, it may not be perfect - your feedback is welcome! HOW HAS THIS BEEN REVIEWED?

A Kindness Cup is praised for its smart and compassionate narrative. It is recognised as one of the earliest empathetic works by a white Australian writer addressing the horrors of nineteenth-century racial violence. The reissue of the novel offers a chance to appreciate Thea Astley's incisive examination of social injustice, with the book being noted as one of Australia's finest short novels.

Book Hero reading reviews

Book Details

INFORMATION

ISBN: 9781925603545

Publisher: Text Publishing

Format: Paperback / softback

Date Published: 30 April 2018

Country: Australia

Imprint: The Text Publishing Company

Audience: General / adult

DIMENSIONS

Width: 129.0mm

Height: 198.0mm

Weight: 250g

Pages: 224

About the Author

Thea Astley was born in Brisbane in 1925. Her first novel, Girl with a Monkey, was published in 1958 and her third, The Well Dressed Explorer (1962), won the Miles Franklin Literary Award. Many notable books followed, among them the groundbreaking A Kindness Cup (1974), which addressed frontier massacres of Indigenous Australians, and It’s Raining in Mango (1987). Her last novel was Drylands (1999), her fourth Miles Franklin winner. Her fiction is distinguished by vivid imagery and metaphor; a complex, ironic style; and a desire to highlight oppression and social injustice. One of the most distinctive and influential Australian novelists of the twentieth century, Astley died in 2004.

Also by Kate Grenville

View all
  • The Case Against Fragrance
    A beautifully written, clear-eyed investigation of the science of scent and the power of the fragrance industry, from one of Australia's greatest writers. Kate Grenville had always associated perfume with elegance and beauty. Then the headaches started. Like perhaps a quarter of the population, Grenville reacts badly to the artificial fragrances around usβ€”other people's perfumes, and all those scented cosmetics,...
    Paperback
    $2200
    Elsewhere:
    $2400
    Available
    Ships in 4-6 weeks
  • Unsettled
    What does it mean to be on land taken from others? What does it mean to be on land that was taken from other people? Now that we know how the taking was done, what do we do with that knowledge? Kate Grenville is no stranger to the past. Her success and fame as a writer exploded when she published...
    Paperback
    $4100
    Elsewhere:
    $4500
    Available
    Ships in 4-6 weeks
  • Elizabeth Macarthur's Letters
    Elizabeth Macarthur's Letters by Kate Grenville is a captivating collection, serving as the inspiration for her bestselling, award-winning novel A Room Made of Leaves. These letters formed the foundation for Kate Grenville's acclaimed novel, A Room Made of Leaves. They inspired the depiction of her imagined Elizabeth Macarthurβ€”shrewd, subtle, and passionate. Through these letters, we get a glimpse into the...
    Hardback
    $3600
    Elsewhere:
    $4000
    Available
    Ships in 4-6 weeks
  • The Secret River
    After a childhood of poverty and petty crime in the slums of London, William Thornhill is transported to New South Wales for the term of his natural life. With his wife Sal and children in tow, he arrives in a harsh land that feels at first like a death sentence. But among the convicts, there is a whisper that freedom...
    Paperback
    $2400
    Elsewhere:
    $2600
    Available
    Ships in 4-6 weeks
  • A Room Made of Leaves
    The first new novel in almost ten years from award-winning, bestselling author Kate Grenville. What if Elizabeth Macarthurβ€”wife of the notorious John Macarthur, wool baron in the earliest days of Sydneyβ€”had written a shockingly frank secret memoir? And what if novelist Kate Grenville had miraculously found and published it? That's the starting point for A Room Made of Leaves, a...
    Hardback
    $4400
    Elsewhere:
    $4800
    Available
    Ships in 4-6 weeks
  • A Room Made of Leaves
    Kate Grenville's latest bestselling novel, now in a beautiful paperback edition. What if Elizabeth Macarthurβ€”wife of the notorious John Macarthur, wool baron in the earliest days of Sydneyβ€”had written a shockingly frank secret memoir? And what if novelist Kate Grenville had miraculously found and published it? Marriage to a ruthless bully, the impulses of her heart, the search for power...
    Paperback
    $3400
    Elsewhere:
    $3700
    Available
    Ships in 4-6 weeks
  • A Room Made of Leaves
    Kate Grenville's latest bestselling novel, now in a smaller format and featuring a beautiful updated cover design. What if Elizabeth Macarthurβ€”wife of the notorious John Macarthur, wool baron in the earliest days of Sydneyβ€”had written a shockingly frank secret memoir? And what if novelist Kate Grenville had miraculously found and published it? Marriage to a ruthless bully, the impulses of...
    Paperback
    $2400
    Elsewhere:
    $2600
    In Stock
    Ships today
  • Restless Dolly Maunder
    Restless Dolly Maunder is shortlisted for the 2024 Women's Prize for Fiction. An exquisite portrait of Kate Grenville's complex, conflicted grandmotherβ€”a woman Kate feared as a child, and only came to understand in adulthood. Dolly Maunder was born at the end of the nineteenth century, when society's long-locked doors were starting to creak ajar for women. Growing up in a...
    Hardback
    $4500
    Elsewhere:
    $5000
    Available
    Ships in 4-6 weeks
  • Restless Dolly Maunder
    Dolly Maunder was born at the end of the nineteenth century, when society’s long-locked doors were starting to creak ajar for women. Growing up in a poor farming family in country New South Wales but clever, energetic and determined, Dolly spent her restless life pushing at those doors. Most women like her have disappeared from view, remembered only in family...
    Paperback
    $3600
    Elsewhere:
    $4000
    Available
    Ships in 4-6 weeks
  • Sarah Thornhill
    From the beginning, Jack and I were friends. Somehow our way of looking at things fitted together. He never called me Dolly, the way the others did, only my full and proper name. Sarah Thornhill is the youngest child of William Thornhill, convict-turned-landowner on the Hawkesbury River. She grows up in the fine house her father is so proud of,...
    Paperback
    $2700
    Elsewhere:
    $3000
    Available
    Ships in 4-6 weeks
  • Dark Places
    This is Albion Gidley Singer at the pen, a man with a weakness for a good fact. The first fact is always the hardest: you have to begin somewhere, and such is the nature of this intractable universe that the only thing you can start with is yourself. Dark Places, a companion novel to Lilian's Story, is the tale of...
    Paperback
    $1799
    Available
    Ships in 4-6 weeks
  • Lilian's Story
    Listen, I told myself, and heard the waves against the harbour-wall, a gull being peevish, the white tapping stick of a blind man against the stones. Listen, I told myself, this is history. Loosely inspired by the legendary Sydney bohemian Bea Miles, Kate Grenville’s much-loved debut novel recounts the life of the irrepressible Lilian Una Singer: from wealthy middle-class girlhood...
    Paperback
    $1799
    Available
    Ships in 4-6 weeks

Also by Thea Astley

View all
  • Drylands
    First published in 1999, Drylands was Thea Astley's fourth and final Miles Franklin winner. In the dying town of Drylands, Janet Deakin sells papers to lonely locals. At night, in her flat above the newsagency, she attempts to write a novel for a world in which no one reads - 'full of people, she envisaged, glaring at a screen that...
    Paperback
    $1799
    In Stock
    Ships today
  • Reaching Tin River
    A woman becomes obsessed with the story of a long-dead colonial pioneer, and her research becomes a way of coming to terms with her own past. Researching in the archives, Belle discovers the long-dead Gaden Lockyer, a colonial pioneer in Jericho Flats, and soon becomes obsessed. Belle's quest for Lockyer is her way of coming to terms with the pastβ€”her...
    Paperback
    $1799
    Available
    Ships in 4-6 weeks
  • The Multiple Effects of Rainshadow
    There are distant shouts, rifle shots, the pounding of feet across the bridge, the sound of running. A woman’s scream carves the night then bubbles away. In 1930, the superintendent of a mission on a Queensland island, driven mad by his wife’s death, goes on a murderous rampage. Fearing for their lives, the other whites arm a young Indigenous man...
    Paperback
    $1799
    Available
    Ships in 4-6 weeks
  • It's Raining in Mango: Popular Penguins
    Wresting his family from the easy living of 19th-century Sydney, Cornelius Laffey takes them to northern Queensland where thousands of hopefuls are digging for gold in the mud. They confront the horror of Aboriginal dispossession, and Cornelius is sacked for reporting the slaughter. It's Raining in Mango: Popular Penguins is an unforgettable tale of the other side of Australia's heritage....
    Paperback
    $1599
    In Stock
    Ships today

More from General Fiction

View all
  • The Wedding People
    'BEST READ OF THE YEAR SO FAR' THE TIMES 'BOOKS AS FUN AS THIS ONE ARE FEW AND FAR BETWEEN' GUARDIAN Phoebe Stone arrives at a grand beachside hotel in Rhode Island wearing her best dress and least comfortable shoes. Immediately she is mistaken for one of the wedding people β€” but she's actually the only guest at the Cornwall...
    Paperback
    $2399
    Elsewhere:
    $2799
    (3)
    In Stock
    Ships today
  • New Release
    Land
    Inspired by the mapping of Ireland in the mid nineteenth century, Land, theΒ new novel from the author of Hamnet, is at once intimate and epic: a portrait of a family navigating a legacy of upheaval and loss with love and hope. On a windswept peninsula stretching out into the Atlantic, TomΓ‘s and his reluctant son,Β Liam, are working for the great...
    Paperback
    $3199
    Elsewhere:
    $3799
    In Stock
    Ships today
  • Mistborn Trilogy Boxed Set
    The Mistborn Trilogy Boxed Set by Brandon Sanderson is a landmark fantasy series that has captivated readers worldwide. Renowned for its innovative magic system, intricate world-building, and compelling characters, this trilogy is a must-have for any fantasy enthusiast. Immerse yourself in a world shrouded in ash, where a once-hopeful land is ruled by the tyrannical Dark Lord, known as the...
    Set
    $6800
    Elsewhere:
    $7500
    (2)
    In Stock
    Ships today
  • The Deal
    Welcome to Briar U! Get ready for your newest obsession . . . Discover the addictive world of the Off-Campus series from The Queen of Hockey Romance, Elle Kennedy! Read The Deal now for the perfect fake-dating romance! She's about to make a deal with the college bad boy . . . Hannah Wells has finally found someone who turns...
    Paperback
    $2499
    Elsewhere:
    $2799
    In Stock
    Ships today
  • Throne of Glass Box Set (Paperback)
    Enter the realm. Unleash the darkness. Live the legend. Discover the worldwide phenomenon of the #1 New York Times-bestselling Throne of Glass series in this gorgeous 8-book box set! In a land without magic, an assassin is summoned to the castle. She has no love for the vicious king who rules from his throne of glass, but she has not...
    Set
    $12400
    Elsewhere:
    $15500
    (6)
    In Stock
    Ships today
  • Crescent City Paperback Box Set
    A beautiful box set containing all three paperback instalments of the Crescent City series from #1 bestselling global phenomenon Sarah J. Maas. BOUND BY BLOOD. TEMPTED BY DESIRE. UNLEASHED BY DESTINY. Maas has established herself as a fantasy fiction titan - Time Think Game of Thrones meets Buffy the Vampire Slayer with a drizzle of E.L. James – Telegraph Spiced...
    Set
    $5499
    Elsewhere:
    $7000
    In Stock
    Ships today
  • Project Hail Mary
    THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLING NOVEL A BARACK OBAMA READING PICK A lone astronaut. An impossible mission. An ally he never imagined. 'The most enjoyable hard SF I have read in years' GUARDIAN 'Weir's finest work to date... This is the one book I read last year that I am certain I can recommend to anyone, no matter who, and know...
    Paperback
    $2099
    Elsewhere:
    $2800
    In Stock
    Ships today
  • Signed Bookplate
    New Release
    Light Wielder
    THE EPIC CONCLUSION TO METAL SLINGER, AKA THE BOOK WITH THE PLOT TWIST THAT BROKE THE INTERNET Sail the seas. Master the blade. Protect your heart. What would you do to have it all? READERS ARE GOING WILD FOR *METAL SLINGER* β€˜The BEST plot twist to ever grace my Kindle’ ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ β€˜The author is a mastermind. Romantasy is back!!!!’ ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐...
    Paperback
    $3199
    Elsewhere:
    $3799
    In Stock
    Ships today
  • Signed Copy
    New Release
    The Ballad of Falling Dragons
    ☽ Raeve and Kaan will return in the highly anticipated sequel to the #1 internationally bestselling phenomenon, When The Moon Hatched. Prepare for more danger, magic, romance, and dragons! ☽ The #1 Sunday Times bestselling sensation When the Moon Hatched continues with the second book in The Moonfall Series, The Ballad of Falling Dragons… Discover the phenomenon everyone's falling for:...
    Paperback
    $3000
    Elsewhere:
    $3899
    (1)
    In Stock
    Ships today
  • Dungeon Crawler Carl
    The apocalypse will be televised! Welcome to the first book in the wildly popular and addictive Dungeon Crawler Carl series by Matt Dinniman-now with bonus material exclusive to the print edition! You know what's worse than breaking up with your girlfriend? Being stuck with her prize-winning show cat. And you know what's worse than that? An alien invasion, the destruction...
    Paperback
    $3199
    Elsewhere:
    $3800
    (1)
    In Stock
    Ships today
  • Project Hail Mary
    Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir, the SUNDAY TIMES and NEW YORK TIMES bestselling author of The Martian, offers a gripping new adventure in hard science fiction. With endorsement from notable figures such as Barack Obama and a slew of five-star reviews, this novel promises a thrilling and intellectually stimulating journey. Ryland Grace, a lone astronaut, finds himself on a...
    Paperback
    $2399
    Elsewhere:
    $2400
    (4)
    In Stock
    Ships today
  • There Is No Antimemetics Division
    Mind-bending science fiction about antimemes: ideas that attack memory, identity, and the fabric of reality itself. An antimeme is an entity with self-censoring properties. Some are benign, but others, less so... These entities can feed on your most cherished memories, the things that make you youβ€”and you'll never even know anything changed. And they aren't just feeding on us. They're...
    By qntm
    Paperback
    $3199
    Elsewhere:
    $3800
    (2)
    In Stock
    Ships today

Why buy from us?

Book Hero is not a chain store or big box retailer. We're an independent 100% NZ-owned business on a mission to help more Kiwis rediscover a love of books and reading!

Service & Delivery

Service & Delivery

Our warehouse in Auckland holds over 80,000 books, toys, board games and puzzles in-stock so you're not waiting for your order to arrive from overseas.

Auckland Bookstore

Auckland Bookstore

We're primarily an online store, but for your convenience you can pick up your order for free from our bookstore, which is right next door to our warehouse in Hobsonville.

Our Gifting Service

Our Gifting Service

Books make wonderful thoughtful gifts and we're here to help with gift-wrapping and cards. We can even send your gift directly to your loved one.