Two girls are brought together under the worst of circumstances: a prison ship taking them from London to ‘parts beyond the sea’.
Miriam is a Romany girl drawn from freedom in the hills of the North-West to the city to eke a living playing her tin-whistle in a place where her people are despised. When her mother dies – from cholera, the ‘gypsy disease’ – she’s caught breaking-and-entering and sentenced to transportation.
Rose has been brought up to expect more, but when her husband dies and her father is sent down for illegal slave-trading, she’s separated from her children and forced to take a governess’s job. When she’s caught stealing, the judge shows no mercy.
Surviving – just – an appalling voyage, the two arrive just after Christmas into the blinding sun of the strange new island: Van Dieman’s Land. Here they are sent to work in a nursery, where women of ill-repute give birth before being sent for correction. The nursery is run by a corrupt, debauched Reverend and his idealistic son, who soon takes a fancy to Miriam. But Rose, her best friend and close confidant, watches jealously and makes plans to reverse their fortunes.
The Night Flower takes the reader on a thrilling Dickensian adventure through the dark side of our penal history to a Tasmanian frontier town where anything could happen and morality is made by monsters.
Over de auteur
Sarah Stovell was born in 1977 and grew up in Oxfordshire. She lives in Northumberland.
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