It won the 2012 Australian Book Industry Awards (ABIA) — Australian General Fiction Book of the Year,[2] and was shortlisted for the 2012 Prime Minister's Literary Awards.

Sarah's mother is now dead and her father has re-married, who attempts to conceal and overcome her husband's convict past.

But Sarah has a will of her own and falls in love with Jack Langland, a "half darkie", the product of a white father and an Aboriginal mother.

Belinda McKeon in The Guardian noted: "It is with often marvellous vividness and clarity that Grenville evokes Sarah's world, from childhood on the Hawkesbury, through an adolescence of idealistic love, to a marriage towards which she goes with a resigned heart but of which she ultimately makes a fine hand.

"[3] Delia Falconer in The Monthly found that "Like its predecessors, Sarah Thornhill will be welcomed by many readers as just the story we need now; others may prefer a less comforting, more ambiguous version of the past.