City of Belmont - Ruth Faulkner Public Library

The ripping tree, Nikki Gemmell

eng

no index present

fiction

The ripping tree

Nikki Gemmell

An illustrious family. A beautiful home. A shipwrecked young woman left on its door step. Don't think they're going to save her... Early 1800s. Thomasina Trelora, a wild, free-spirited young woman, is on her way to Australia. Her fate: to be married to a widowed clergyman she's never met. But as she approaches the Australian coast a storm wrecks her ship and leaves her lying on the rocks - alone, battered and near death. She's saved by an Aboriginal man who carries her to the door of a grand European house, Willowbrae, and leaves her at the doorstep. In this world of colonial decorum, Tom is suddenly free to be whoever she wants and a whole new life opens up to her. But as she's drawn deeper into the intriguing world of Willowbrae she discovers that things aren't, actually, quite as they seem - and that she may have exchanged one kind of prison for another. This is an intense, sharp shiver of a novel, a gripping tale of survival and a powerful story of landscape, liberty and identity which examines the darkness at the heart of early colonisation

adult