ISBN: 0099425157
(9780099425151)
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by Rose Tremain
Category: Romance, Sagas & HistoricalDescription:
This is a writer whose breadth of imagination and supple prose transcend the genre: she is one of the finest writers in English' Daily Telegraph. Joseph and Harriet Blackstone emigrate from Norfolk to New Zealand in search of new beginnings and prosperity. But the harsh land near Christchurch where they settle threatens to destroy them almost before they begin. When Joseph finds gold in the creek he is seized by a rapturous obsession with the voluptuous riches awaiting him deep in the earth. Abandoning his farm and family, he sets off alone for the new gold-fields over the Southern Alps, a moral wilderness where many others, under the seductive dreams of 'the colour', are violently rushing to their destinies. By turns both moving and terrifying, it is a story of the quest for the impossible, an attempt to mine the complexities of love and in the process discover the sacrifices to be made in the pursuit of happiness.
Review:
Rose Tremain has an unerring gift for evoking time and place, whether it be rural England in the 1950s in Sacred Country or the Danish court in the 17th century in Music and Silence, and this new novel, set in New Zealand during the gold rush of the 1860s, is no exception. Desperate to escape from England, where he has done a dreadful thing, Joseph Blackstone has sailed with his wife Harriet and his mother Lilian to start a new life farming on the other side of the world. He has visions of immediate prosperity, but the reality is very different - none of them is prepared for the bleak inhospitable landscape of New Zealand, and when the snows come they must struggle just to survive. Then he finds specks of gold in the creek behind their house and hears of the fortunes being made by gold hunters, and his mind is made up - he will abandon his farm and family and go to seek the tantalizing 'colour' in the muddy lands over the mountains. Meanwhile, Harriet makes friends with Toby and Dorothy Orchard and their delicate son Edwin, whose loyalties are divided between his parents and his much-loved Maori nurse. Tremain perfectly captures her characters' alienation as they strive to make new lives for themselves, their sense of self disrupted by the ever-present possibility of ruin or riches. Away from her amateur choir and social certainties, Lilian cannot find her place in the world; the Orchards succeed in recreating a middle-class English way of life in their farmhouse but cannot insulate themselves from the strange and dangerous power of the new country. The two central characters are both beautifully drawn, Joseph weak, guilty and selfish but capable of incredible determination, and Harriet brave, loving and slowly beginning to realize the force of her own character. This is in many ways a sad novel, full of loss and death, but also of hope; Tremain shows her characters suffer and lose their way, but in the end they all reach some form of redemption. (Kirkus UK)
Author's biography:
Rose Tremain is an internationally acclaimed, prize-winning author of novels, short stories and screenplays. Her most recent novel, the bestselling Music and Silence, won the Whitbread Novel of the Year Award. She lives in Norfolk and London with the biographer Richard Holmes.
In stock: 32 copies
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