The New York Times best-selling historical novelist delivers her biggest boldest and most ambitious novel yet — a sweeping Victorian epic of lost love lies jealousy and rebellion set in colonial Barbados.
Barbados 1854: Emily Dawson has always been the poor cousin in a prosperous English merchant clan — merely a vicar’s daughter and a reform-minded vicar’s daughter at that. Everyone knows that the family’s lucrative shipping business will go to her cousin Adam one day. But when her grandfather dies Emily receives an unexpected inheritance: Peverills a sugar plantation in Barbados — a plantation her grandfather never told anyone he owned.
When Emily accompanies her cousin and his new wife to Barbados she finds Peverills a burnt-out shell reduced to ruins in 1816 when a rising of enslaved people sent the island up in flames. Rumors swirl around the derelict plantation; people whisper of ghosts.
Why would her practical-minded grandfather leave her a property in ruins? Why are the neighboring plantation owners the Davenants so eager to acquire Peverills? The answer lies in the past — a tangled history of lies greed clandestine love heartbreaking betrayal and a bold bid for freedom.
A brilliant multigenerational saga in the tradition of The Thorn Birds and North and South The Summer Country will beguile listeners with its rendering of families heartbreak and the endurance of hope against all odds.
