A GREAT ACT OF LOVE

Australian author Rose has written a historical novel about the island of Tasmania—largely settled by convicts transported against their will, along with other social outcasts—through the experience of one determined 19th-century settler, not a convict but a grieving widow starting her life over.

The only catch is that 23-year-old Caroline Douglas, who disembarks in Hobart with her nephew, Quill, was never married. She’s actually Caroline Colbert, and Quill is not her nephew but a 10-year-old cabin boy she purchased from a ship’s captain (who bought him from the boy’s father). Caroline has arrived from New York City, having previously fled London to avoid arrest for thievery, the lucrative career she took up after her French-born father, Jacques-Louis, a respected London apothecary, was convicted of murder in 1836. She’s moving to Van Diemen’s Land—soon to be renamed Tasmania—aware that he was shipped to the prison on nearby Norfolk Island. With the ambivalent hope of finding Jacques-Louis, who may or may not have gone mad, Caroline buys land and raises wine grapes. It’s not a coincidence that in pre-revolutionary France, before his parents met the guillotine, the Colbert family business was winemaking. If this seems like a lot of backstories, it is. Tying her earnestly researched history of the period to the origin story of one fictional family, Rose employs a surfeit of subplots, along with lessons in wine making and excerpts from poetry, primarily The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Expect several murders and sexual assaults, characters in multiple disguises, gratuitous cameos by historic figures, madness, villainy, and one rather thin romance. Caroline and Quill, who have an idyllic mother-son relationship, become close friends with their neighbors, the historically accurate Swanstons, and fictional Cornelius, a skilled blacksmith with secrets of his own. Although secondary characters border on two-dimensional good or evil, Caroline is a refreshing mix, continually weighing morality against ambition. Her absorbing consideration of the rewards and limitations of personal reinvention becomes the book’s great strength.

There are genuine insights into human nature in this exhausting, sometimes overwritten deep dive into Tasmanian history.