A Great Act of Love
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4.1 • 41 Ratings
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
From the award-winning author of The Museum of Modern Love and Bruny comes an enthralling tale of legacy, love and the making of champagne.
Caroline will tell the story of how she came to Tasmania, when it was still called Van Diemen's Land, many times. She will cast her inventions into the future. Those who carry them on will call it history, but she will call it her life.
Van Diemen's Land, 1839. A young woman of means arrives in Hobart, with a young boy in her care. Leasing an old cottage next to an abandoned vineyard, Caroline Douglas must navigate an insular colony of exiles and opportunists to create a new life on this island of extreme seasons and wild beauty. But Caroline is carrying a secret of such magnitude it has led her to cross the world, and it will take all she is made of to bring it into the light.
Soaring from the champagne vineyards of revolutionary France to London and early colonial Australia, A Great Act of Love is a spellbinding novel of legacy, passion and reinvention. At its heart is a family with champagne in their blood and a fearless daughter determined to rewrite fate.
Inspired by true events, A Great Act of Love is an immensely beautiful and heartrending saga of a father and daughter, and the enduring power of familial love.
'A page-turner, you simply must read it.'
Caroline Overington, The Australian
'A very compelling read.'
The Guardian
'A historical tale that cracks along with a masterly gusto.'
The Sydney Morning Herald
'A beautifully written account of a woman's attempts to reinvent herself and rescue those she loves.'
Sunday Times, Historical Fiction Pick of the Month
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Australian author Rose follows up Bunny with the sumptuous story of an 18th-century Englishwoman who leaves behind her criminal past in search of a new life and winds up in Van Diemen's Land (present-day Tasmania). Caroline Colbert was trained by her father to be an apothecary and by her glamorous aunt to be a thief. With her father in jail for murder and her aunt in police custody, Caroline assumes a new identity and travels first to New York City and then around the tip of South America, fending off the advances of a "reptilian" bird collector and adopting Quill, a cabin boy who was given to the captain to settle a debt. It's 1836 when she and Quill arrive in Van Diemen's Land, where she buys a cottage and finds work as a governess, all the while scheming to revive a former vineyard to produce champagne. The novel's colorful supporting cast includes a father damaged by a head injury, the commandant of a prison colony, and a formerly enslaved man who helps Caroline with the vineyard. Though the narrative takes a few melodramatic turns and relies on some unlikely coincidences to reach its conclusion, for the most part it sustains a pleasing spirit of adventure. This is a treat for historical fiction fans.
Customer Reviews
Enjoyable historical novel set around actual events in Tasmania.
Interestingly told with champagne history in Tasmania very enlightening.