Description
‘Quite splendid…a thoroughly intelligent and entertaining saga which follows five generations of women through the history of their emancipation’
Company
Sarah and Helena. Sisters in the year 1855. For Helena the future was marriage to wealthy manufacturer of military supplies, childless and shot through with pain. For Sarah, a new continent beckoned from the other side of the world. The long voyage to Australia, the hard life of the bush, survival against odds.
Pearl was the next generation. Branded a child prostitute in a garrison town and seeking out what salvation she could as wife to a working man and mother to sons destined for death in the trenches.
Ruby, the survivor, wife to a merchant of the Raj and widos to a victim of India’s independence, coming home to an old age of large gins and loneliness.
And Jackie, a child of the liberated society and heir to the struggles of women through more than a century…
‘Travels a long way in time and space…gives a resume of the last hundred years of women’s struggle for emancipation while telling a rattling good tale ‘ The Times Literary Supplement
‘Succeeds as both a feminist and a family saga, instructing us subtly even as it entertains’ New York Times
Paperback, 511 pages. In very good preloved condition with the exception of a name inside the front cover.