In the Shadow of the Trees (26 page)

When Tamar Deane is orphaned at seventeen in a small Cornish village, she seizes the chance for a new life and emigrates to New Zealand. In March 1879, alone and frightened on the Plymouth quay, she is befriended by an extraordinary woman. Myrna McTaggert is travelling to Auckland with plans to establish the finest brothel in the southern hemisphere, and her unconventional friendship proves invaluable when Tamar makes disastrous choices in the new colony. Tragedy and scandal befall her, until unexpected good fortune brings vast changes to Tamar’s life. As the century draws to a close, uncertainty looms when a distant war lures her loved ones to South Africa. This dramatic story—the first in a sweeping three-volume family sags—has a vivacious and compelling heroine who will live with the reader long after the final page has been turned.

In 1914, Tamar Murdoch’s brothelkeeping days are behind her. Her life is one of ease and contentment at Kenmore, a prosperous estate in the Hawke’s Bay, as storm clouds over Europe begin casting long shadows.

In this gripping second instalment of Deborah Challinor’s sweeping family saga, Tamar’s love for her children is sorely tested as one by one they are called, or driven, into the living hell of World War One.

During the Boer War, Joseph, her illegitimate eldest son, fought as a European, but this time he is determined to enlist in the Maori Battalion, despite his growing attraction for his childhood friend, Erin. As loyalties within the Murdoch clan are divided, and the war takes Tamar and Andrew’s only daughter far from her sheltered upbringing, the people and experiences their children encounter will shape the destiny of the Murdoch clan for generations to come.

On 3 February 1931, Napier is devastated by a powerful earthquake—and Tamar Murdoch, beloved matriarch of Kenmore, is seriously injured. As she recovers, Tamar is preoccupied with the ongoing effects of the Great Depression. When her grandson threatens to leave for Spain to join the International Brigade, she feels a familiar dread—once again her family is threatened by war and heartbreak, as Hitler’s armies march.

In the final volume of the Tamar trilogy, the story of the feisty Cornish seamstress who became a brothelkeeper and landowner is brought to a stirring and memorable conclusion.

On Christmas Eve 1953 a lahar gushed out of Mount Ruapehu’s crater lake and swept down a darkened valley, fatally weakening a railway bridge at Tangiwai. Minutes later a packed overnight express train nose-dived into the river. Most of the 285 passengers were asleep and 151 perished in one of the world’s worst train disasters.

For Maori the tragedy was inevitable. Tangiwai means weeping waters and was known as the place of torrential flows and death.

When a young vulcanologist comes to research early warning systems on the mountain, she finds herself in the middle of a raging debate between local landowners, iwi and government agencies. She also finds herself torn between two men, each on opposing sides…And another deadly lahar is building.

In a taut, atmospheric action romance, Anne Maria Nicholson introduces Frances Nelson, a scientist who walks a fine line between life and death, in a haunting contemporary love story set against a fiery and potentially deadly volcano.