1789. The St Pierres are not against social change. They admire
Voltaire and Rousseau, and think the poor ill used. When a US
balloonist drops from the sky the comfortable peace of their
Gascony home is shattered. With him comes passionate love,
sacrifice, personal vendetta, fear, cowardice and real and bloody
revolution spreading from Paris to provincial France. Amid national
chaos young Sophie St Pierre is obsessed by her hope of growing a
perfect crimson rose. In a first novel that is both botanically and
historically well researched and elegantly written, de Kretser
draws a subtle picture of individual lives pierced by violence and
tragedy in a framework of bourgeois French life so evocative you
can smell the garlic and roses.1789. The St Pierres are not against
social change. They admire Voltaire and Rousseau, and think the
poor ill used. When a US balloonist drops from the sky the
comfortable peace of their Gascony home is shattered. With him
comes passionate love, sacrifice, personal vendetta, fear,
cowardice and real, and bloody revolution spreading from Paris to
provincial France. Amid national chaos young Sophie St Pierre is
obsessed by her hope of growing a perfect crimson rose. In a first
novel that is both botanically and historically well researched and
elegantly written, de Kretser draws a subtle picture of individual
lives pierced by violence and tragedy in a framework of bourgeois
French life so evocative you can smell the garlic and roses.
(Kirkus UK)
It is the 14th of July, and the world is about to change...Set at the start of the French Revolution, the story centres on a young woman, from a down-at-heel aristocratic family, caught up in the bloodthirstyearly years of the Terror, as events in Paris are duplicated in a small town in the South-West of France. But her private passion is hersearch to create, by grafting, cross-pollination and experiment, an exotic repeat-flowering crimson rose such as had never been grown before then in Europe. Meanwhile, an American balloonist lands in the fields nearby, and falls in love with her sister; and the young local working-class doctor is torn between ethics, reason, revolutionary zeal and unrequited love. A beautiful, elliptical novel about history,love, revolution, the march of science and progress, all beautifully mirrored in the rose - growing metaphor and the rose-grower's passion.
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