Behind the Sun – Deborah Challinor
Irreverent and streetwise prostitute, Friday Woolfe, is in London′s notorious Newgate gaol, awaiting transportation. There, she meets three other girls: intelligent and opportunistic thief, Sarah Morgan, naive young Rachel Winter, and reliable and capable seamstress, Harriet Clarke.
On the voyage to New South Wales, their friendship becomes an unbreakable bond – but there are others on board who will change their lives forever. Friday makes an implacable enemy of Bella Jackson, a vicious woman whose power seems undiminished by her arrest and transportation, while Harriet is taken under the wing of an idealistic doctor, James Downey. Rachel catches the eye of a sinister passenger with more than honour on his mind, whose brutal assault leaves her life hanging in the balance.
When they finally arrive on the other side of the world, they are confined to the grim and overcrowded Parramatta Female Factory. But worse is to come as the threat of separation looms. In the land behind the sun, the only thing they have is each other …
On the day he retires, Inspector Ashwin Chopra inherits two unexpected mysteries.
In a land of exotic splendor, a young Englishwoman finds herself the guardian of an orphan child believed by a dying maharajah to be endowed with magical gifts. It is a role that will take her on a perilous journey into a kingdom’s walled city to protect a child she doesn’t know from a culture she doesn’t understand…
Abraham Isaac, teacher of Latin, philosopher and father, has, after many years, a young pupil. Teaching pulls him back into his memories: of Rose, his first love; Mercy, his stubborn sister; and most of all of Rani, his beloved wife. Of days of youth and promise, when he threw himself into the politics of Singapore in the 50s and 60s. Days when temperance and restraint gave way to action and desire. Days when the culture and society of Singapore were defined and moulded. Days when he believed he had a valuable role to play as a proud citizen of a new country. But now he is old, and the burden of his years weighs on him heavily. Distanced from a present devoid of idealism and obsessed with power and money, Abraham is estranged from his strong, successful son. Descending into the past, Abraham is led from the promise of youth, through cynicism born of experience, to an understanding and reconciliation of his life and times hard-won in maturity.
Set in Singapore in the fifties, the novel focuses on the story of Han.
Memories and Such 