In 1834, Isabella Campbell left England for India, and within two weeks of joining her brother had married his best friend, a dashing cavalry officer named Charles Gascoyne.
Twenty years – and nine children – later, Charles decreed the family should leave India for a nascent British colony on the other side of the world: New Zealand. He went ahead with the children and their governess; Isabella, who was unwell, returned to England. On landing in New Zealand a year later, she found herself ousted by the governess, and rejected by her children and her once-beloved husband. While battle clouds massed over the Gascoyne family, so New Zealand disintegrated into war between British settlers and the Maori. Bloodshed came close when Isabella’s son Fred was embroiled in a massacre by a notorious Maori warrior-prophet. When the Gascoynes were joined by their nephew Bamber, more terror lay in store.
A hundred and fifty years on, Helena Drysdale has woven together the facts and fabric of her cousins’ lives to create an engrossing, intimate map of one family’s journey, vividly illuminating the story of their times.
`A powerful piece of family history . . . and a spellbinding account of the Gascoyne family’s decline and fall’ Miranda Seymour, Sunday Times
`Helena Drysdale has researched her subject impeccably, giving us an absolutely vivid reconstruction of the intimate fabric of Isabella’s life, and her descriptions, from the heat and dust of the Gascoynes’ early life in India to the scarcely believable hardships of the pioneer’s lot, are among the best I have ever read’ Katie Hickman, Daily Mail
`Why did everyone turn against Isabella? The mystery, like life itself, adds to the sense of reality in this wonderful book’ P. J. Kavanagh, Spectator
