The Tea Planter's Wife
The mesmerising escapist historical romance that became a No.1 Sunday Times bestseller
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3.4 • 5 Ratings
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- $3.99
Publisher Description
THE NUMBER ONE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER
A haunting, tender portrait of a woman forced to choose between her duty as a wife and her instinct as a mother...
Nineteen-year-old Gwendolyn Hooper steps off a steamer in Ceylon, Sri Lanka full of optimism, eager to join her new husband. But the man who greets her at the tea plantation is not the same one she fell in love with in London.
Distant and brooding, Laurence spends long days wrapped up in his work, leaving his young bride to explore alone. It's a place filled with clues to the past - locked doors, a yellowed wedding dress in a dusty trunk, an overgrown grave, far too small for an adult...
Gwen soon falls pregnant and her husband is overjoyed, but she has little time to celebrate. In the delivery room the new mother is faced with a terrible choice. When the time comes, how will her husband ever understand what she has done?
'A truly absorbing book' Reader Review
'So many twists and turns. I couldn't wait to see what was going to happen next' Reader Review
'It takes you continuously into new places' Reader Review
'The writer creates the scene with such colour' Reader Review
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Fans of Rebecca and The Wide Sargasso Sea will enjoy this mysterious and heartbreaking epic set in colonial Ceylon. Englishwoman Gwendolyn Hooper travels halfway around the world to join her husband on his tea plantation and finds that the man she married is harboring a secret and tragic past. In the end, though, it’s Gwen’s own lies that threaten to tear the couple apart. Inspired by her own upbringing in colonial Malaysia, author Dinah Jefferies captures the isolation and culture shock that Gwen feels with haunting, lyrical prose.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In her U.S. debut, Jefferies (The Separation), who was born in Malaysia and lives in England, delivers an engrossing tale of mystery, manners, and prejudice set against the backdrop of Ceylon (current-day Sri Lanka). Arriving from England by ship not long after the sinking of the Titanic, Gwen, the 19-year-old bride of Laurence Hooper, heir to a massive tea plantation, senses tension on every side when she comes to the serene but secluded plantation. Who is this widowed man she has married, and what is he hiding from his past? And why does everyone Laurence's sister, the plantation manager, and Laurence himself want Gwen to keep her distance from the affairs of the native workers? As Laurence becomes involved with a mysterious businesswoman and Gwen spends her time with a local Sinhalese man, the past begins to spill into the present at the scenic plantation. Though the writing is at times cluttered and needlessly verbose, Jefferies shows that she can weave a suspenseful tale in which characters' complex motivations converge in surprising ways where compromise can turn out to have been cruelty, and where the aspiration to love overcomes prejudice and tradition. While characters aside from Gwen and Laurence never feel fully fleshed out, Jefferies makes up for this defect by offering suspense and pathos, and by resisting the temptation to gloss over true heartbreak and regret.
