Overview

Seventeen-year-old Liza is happy working as a lady's maid - until her employers decide to emigrate and her father makes up his mind that she is to wed an older widower whom she detests. Determined to avoid a loveless marriage, Liza plans to run away, and when the widower rapes her in order to force her to marry him, she flees back to the family for whom she worked, and they all set out on the long voyage to Australia. On board ship Liza realises she has fallen pregnant, and that even if she can survive the journey, the demanding life of a settler in 1850s Western Australia will be made even harder by an illegitimate child. But Liza is to find that in addition to deprivation of the worst sort, Australia will offer her opportunities she could never have dreamt of back home in Lancashire.

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Reviews

'Catherine Cookson fans will cheer!' -- Peterborough Evening Gazette on Like No Other 'A well-told, well paced story' -- Historical Novel Society

'Catherine Cookson fans will cheer!' -- Peterborough Evening Gazette on Like No Other 'A well-told, well paced story' -- Historical Novel Society

In the mid-19th-century Australia was the New Frontier. People were leaving England in droves in search of adventure: younger sons who had disgraced themselves, the very poor seeking a new life, those running away from personal problems - criminals. Liza Docherty is escaping an enforced marriage to a brute, and a sadistic father. At 18, she's full of optimism even though she's carrying a child - the result of a vicious rape. This is her story, and that of a small group of hopefuls from small-town Lancashire; a rags-to-riches story built on courage, cunning, determination and despair, set in Australia's infertile West. Despite the infertility their new country has much to offer anyone prepared to work hard; though it's far from plain-sailing. Life is precarious, death often comes early, and the new settlers must protect themselves and their property against incursion, as well as natural enemies. Liza finds happiness there for a time - but even Australia is not big enough to hide forever - or to keep memories at bay and, given an unexpected opportunity she returns to England, to discover that there are different kinds of cruelty, that helplessness and hard-living are not always the result of poverty and barbarous ignorance, that sophisticated manipulation. Unhappiness can lurk under fine clothes and inside big houses, and soon she must fight the biggest battle of her life.Drama escalates into melodrama in the last few pages of this novel, as Liza makes her final bid for freedom, peace and happiness. A big, robust novel of wide-open spaces, narrow minds, hard physical toil and the suppression of women by loutish men. (Kirkus UK)

Author Information

Anna Jacobs grew up in Lancashire and emigrated to Australia in 1973, but loves to return to England regularly to visit her family and soak up the history. She has two grown-up daughters and now lives with her husband in a spacious waterfront home. Often as she writes, dolphins frolic outside the window of her study. Inside, the house is crammed with thousands of books. Anna Jacobs has also written a series of novels set in Lancashire about the Gibson family, which are available as Coronet paperbacks..

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