The Claimant

Overview: Janette Turner Hospital grew up in Brisbane and was educated at Wilston State School, Mitchelton High, the University of Queensland and Kelvin Grove Teachers’ College. She taught high school north of Cairns, but since her post-graduate degrees in Canada, she has taught in universities in Canada, Australia, England, France and the United States. She has won a number of prizes for her eight novels and three short-story collections, which have been published in numerous languages. In 2003, she won the Queensland Premier’s Literary Award and the Patrick White Award, and received a Doctor of Letters honoris causa from the University of Queensland. For twelve years, she held an endowed chair as Carolina Distinguished Professor of English at the University of South Carolina. In 2010, she was a Visiting Professor at Columbia University in New York. She continues to teach a course at the University of South Carolina as Carolina Distinguished Professor Emerita. AA brilliant and compulsively readable story of truth, lies and identity from one of Australia's finest writers. 'So then, here it is. the unadorned un-self-flattering gospel, the never-before-told story our intricately intertwined lives ... Listen: I know things that no one else knows. trust me. ' Manhattan, 1996: the trial of the Vanderbilt claimant is finally coming to an end. the case - long, complex, riven with unknowns, attracting huge media and social interest - has been seeking to establish whether or not a certain man is the son of the fabulously wealthy and well-connected Vanderbilt family. the son went missing, presumed dead, while serving in the Vietnam war. there is huge fortune, prestige and status at stake. But is the man - a handsome cattle farmer from Queensland - really the Vanderbilt heir? And if so, why does he seem so reluctant to be found? From one of our foremost novelists, the Claimant is a compelling and ravishingly readable novel about the fluid, shifting and ultimately elusive nature of identity and the reasons why people seek to change their names, their identities or their personalities. 'A genuine page turner with ... verve, fascination and mystery' ABR 'Artful, absorbing and ambitious' Sydney Morning Herald 'Daring, expansive' the Age New York, 1996. At the end of a long complex trial, it seems that a handsome cattle farmer from Queensland is really the Vanderbilt heir. The Claimant is a brilliant contemporary reworking of the Tichbourne case, a legal cause celebre in both the Australian and British press in the late nineteenth century