Today, a family would think nothing of the fact that one of their sons had fallen in love with an Australian woman. In the stodgy nineteenth century, however, the news was taken somewhat differently. Indeed, for the proper British Bligh family in E. W. Hornung’s A Bride From the Bush, a dispatch delivering this information is received in the manner of a bomb detonating at the breakfast table. The author skillfully spins what starts out as a classic fish-out-of-water tale into a beguiling mystery.