num_pages: 384
description: In London in 1865 Lydia Frankland finds a love letter written twenty years earlier by her late stepmother, Jane, to a natural historian at Port Arthur, Louis Lempriere. In the letter Jane confesses she is in love with Louis.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 back to an era that heralded monumental changes in the way mankind thought of itself; where Darwin’s fledgling theories of evolution were threatening long-held religious beliefs. Simpson has drawn upon real nineteenth-century diaries to inspire her fiction and give voice to the silences that history has left behind. (Taken from trove/nla.gov.au)
title: The Curer of Souls
publisher: Vintage Australia