The Curer of Souls
by Lindsay Simpson | Literature & Fiction | This book has not been rated.
ISBN: 9781741661071 Global Overview for this book
ISBN: 9781741661071 Global Overview for this book
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From the back cover:
'You are already spoken for, as am I, yet from the day that I saw your passion and curiosity for life, you seemed at once familiar and shocking to me... It is time to write of secrets so long kept. As each day passes I know that there is truht in Mr Darwin's hypotheses, though he may feel he is confessing to murder.'
'London, 1865. Lydia Frankland finds a love letter from her stepmother, Jane, to Louis Lempriere, an amateur botanist in POrt Arthur. The letter suggest Jane had an affair with Lempriere in Van Diemens Land twenty years before, when Lydia's father was governor there.
Compelled to uncover the truth about her family's past, Lydia sets sail to the colony, now named Tasmania. There she discovers diaries and letters containing more family secrets and she is horrified to realise that her heroic father presided over a penal colony so cruel that prisoners, including young boys, chose death over incarceration. She is also taken to an era that heralded monumnetal changes in the way mankind thought of itself; where Darwin's fledgling theories of evolution were threatening long-held religious beliefs.
As dark truths are reveleaded, and Lydia discovers more about Jane and Louis' relationship, she wonders whetehr history is best left undisturbed. Will the price of her curiosity put her own longed-for love in jeopardy?
In htis gripping historical novel Simpson has drawn upon real nineteenth century diaries to inspire her fiction and give voice to the silence that history has left behind.
'You are already spoken for, as am I, yet from the day that I saw your passion and curiosity for life, you seemed at once familiar and shocking to me... It is time to write of secrets so long kept. As each day passes I know that there is truht in Mr Darwin's hypotheses, though he may feel he is confessing to murder.'
'London, 1865. Lydia Frankland finds a love letter from her stepmother, Jane, to Louis Lempriere, an amateur botanist in POrt Arthur. The letter suggest Jane had an affair with Lempriere in Van Diemens Land twenty years before, when Lydia's father was governor there.
Compelled to uncover the truth about her family's past, Lydia sets sail to the colony, now named Tasmania. There she discovers diaries and letters containing more family secrets and she is horrified to realise that her heroic father presided over a penal colony so cruel that prisoners, including young boys, chose death over incarceration. She is also taken to an era that heralded monumnetal changes in the way mankind thought of itself; where Darwin's fledgling theories of evolution were threatening long-held religious beliefs.
As dark truths are reveleaded, and Lydia discovers more about Jane and Louis' relationship, she wonders whetehr history is best left undisturbed. Will the price of her curiosity put her own longed-for love in jeopardy?
In htis gripping historical novel Simpson has drawn upon real nineteenth century diaries to inspire her fiction and give voice to the silence that history has left behind.
