"Here is someone who can really write". Lilian's Story was her first published novel (1985) and won The Australian/Vogel Literary Award. It was loosely based on the story of Bea Miles, known in Sydney for her eccentric public behaviour. It has become one of Australia's best-loved novels and in 1996 was made into a film starring Ruth Cracknell and Toni Collette; Collette won the Australian Film Institute award for supporting actress for her performance as the young Lilian. Dreamhouse followed in 1986, and appeared as the 1994 film Traps. Joan Makes History – the recipient of an Australian Bicentennial Commission – was published in 1988. In 1994 Grenville returned to the characters and setting of Lilian's Story with a companion novel – Dark Places – that re-tells the events of the earlier novel from the point of view of Lilian's incestuous father. Dark Places won the Victorian Premier's Literary Award in 1995. (In the US this novel is titled Albion's Story.) The Idea of Perfection appeared in 2000 and won the Orange Prize for Fiction, at the time Britain's richest literary award. In 2006 The Secret River was published, the first of Grenville's books that take Australia's colonial past, and relations with Australia's indigenous people, as their subject. The Secret River was inspired by the story of Grenville's own great-great-great grandfather, a convict sent to Australia from London in 1806. This book won the Commonwealth Prize, the Christina Stead Award, and the NSW Premier's Community Relations Prize, and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. Searching for The Secret River (2006) is a memoir about the research and writing of the novel, tracing the journey of the author's increasing awareness of how Australia's colonial past informs its present. The Lieutenant (2008) is set thirty years earlier than The Secret River. Based on the historical notebooks of Lieutenant William Dawes, it tells the story of the friendship between a soldier with the First Fleet and a young Gadigal girl. These two novels together explore something of the complexity of black-white relations in Australia's past. Sarah Thornhill (2011) is the sequel to The Secret River and takes up the story of William Thornhill's youngest daughter. It can be read as a stand-alone novel, without reference to The Secret River. In 2015 Grenville published One Life: My Mother's Story, in which she uses the fragments of memoir that her mother left to construct