Showing results by author "Emma Harcourt" in All Categories

1496 It is the height of the Renaissance and its flowering of intellectual and artistic endeavour, but the city state of Florence is in the grip of fundamentalist preacher Friar Girolamo Savonarola. Its good people believe the Lord speaks through him, just as certainly as the Sun circles the Earth. For Leonarda Lunetta, eldest daughter of the learned Signore Vincenzio Fusili, religion is not as interesting as the books she shares with her beloved father. Reading is an escape from the ridicule flung her way, for Luna is not like other girls.

Leaving behind the loneliness and trauma of her past in country Australia, Annie Brand arrives to the political upheaval and glittering international society of Shanghai in the 1920s. Journeying up the Yangtze with her new husband, the ship's captain, Annie revels in the sense of adventure but when her husband sends her back to Shanghai, her freedom is quickly curtailed. Against her will, Annie finds herself living alone in the International Settlement, increasingly suffocated by the judgmental Club ladies and their exclusive social scene: one even more restrictive than that she came from.