The Dreaming
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4.5 • 2 Ratings
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- $27.99
Publisher Description
Set in the untamed landscape of mid-nineteenth century Australia, The Dreaming is a rich and potent tale of hidden passion and broken taboo.
Australia, 1871—Following her mother’s sudden death, Joanna Drury sets sail from India and arrives in Melbourne to claim the property left to her by her mother—and to trace the mysteries of her family’s past.
From her first steps on shore, Joanna becomes entangled with a lost boy who leads her to the fascinating Hugh Westbrook. She agrees to look after the child in exchange for Hugh’s help in finding her inheritance. But she falls deeply in love with Hugh and with life at his sheep station, Merinda.
When strange nightmares begin to plague her—the same that tormented her mother—Joanna starts to notice the Aborigines’ strange reaction to her. Delving into Australia’s past, she discovers the tragic events that have marked her family’s destiny and her own life, events that happened long ago in the time the Aborigines call “the Dreaming.”
Full of intriguing historical detail, Wood’s compelling story brings the clash of immigrant and Aboriginal cultures to stunning life, capturing the danger, mystery, and romance of an emerging country.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This opulent, slightly overdone epic chronicles Australia, grand and still untamed, in a time of tremendous growth. Recently orphaned Joanna Drury sails to Melbourne from England in 1871, intending to ferret out the secrets that killed her mother, Lady Emily, who dreamed of serpents and wild dogs and died mysteriously suffering from symptoms similar to rabies. Joanna has inherited her mother's dreams and, she fears,her fate. The cause of her mother's elusive malady, she believes, lies in Lady Emily's childhood in Australia. But soon after landing, the lonely and beautiful Joanna falls in love and marries handsome Hugh Westbrook. They settle into a loving, though not always peaceful life on Hugh's rapidly growing sheep station and raise two children, Adam and Beth. But bad luck and frightening thoughts continue to haunt Joanna, and her search for Karra Karra, a place somewhere in the outback, which the dying Lady Emily directed her to find, leads Joanna and 12-year-old Beth into a dangerous part of Australia where few whites have gone before. While tales of the aborigines' intriguing culture add a particular and welcome atmosphere to this romantic saga, the enigmatic mysticism central to the plot prevents the reader from becoming totally absorbed in Joanna's plight.
