The Tea Planter's Wife
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2.7 • 3 Ratings
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
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 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 the plantation alone. It's a place filled with clues to the past - locked doors, a yellowed wedding dress in a dusty trunk, an overgrown grave hidden in the grounds, 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, one she knows no one in her upper class set will understand - least of all Laurence. Forced to bury a secret at the heart of her marriage, Gwen is more isolated than ever. When the time comes, how will her husband ever understand what she has done?
The Tea Planter's Wife is a story of guilt, betrayal and untold secrets vividly and entrancingly set in colonial era Ceylon.
'Captivating, powerful and passionate' Deborah Rodriguez on The Separation
'A richly detailed story... as intimate as a kiss and as sharp as the blade of a knife' David Gilham on The Separation
'I simply didn't want to put it down. Vivid and atmospheric - you can smell the tropics, feel the drenching heat...' Isabel Wolff on The Separation
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.