The Sirens by Emilia Hart

 

In 1788 twin sisters, Mary and Eliza, are convicts on board a ship transporting them from England to the colony of New South Wales. They are packed in with other female convicts under appalling conditions, fearful of what fate awaits them.

In Australia in 2019 Lucy has just graduated from high school and is going to visit her older sister, Jess, an artist who has bought back the former family home in Comber Bay on the New South Wales south coast. Famously, a convict ship sank when it hit the rocks outside Comber Bay in 1788; over the years there has also been the disappearance, presumed drowned, of a number of men.

Lucy and Jess both suffer from an allergy to water which leaves their skin tender and flakey and has brought them both anguish and vulnerability. Jess has secrets that Lucy has yet to learn and which unfold dramatically over the course of the book.

Both Jess and Lucy have strong, subconscious connections to the tragic twins, which come to them in dreams, although neither of them is aware that the other is experiencing the same thing. The story of the convict ship is woven vividly through the book and it is sad and shocking. I discovered recently that one of my ancestors was a female convict transported to Van Diemens Land (Tasmania) and it is pretty unbearable to think of what she must have suffered in order for me to exist in this beautiful country. She married a male convict and I hope they had some measure of comfort together as they or possibly their children moved to New South Wales (I’ll have to check with the family historian).

Emilia Hart’s intriguing, atmospheric story is going to stay with me for a long time, as I am sure it will for all of its readers.

Published by Harper Collins Australia 

Venetian Lessons in Love by Jenna Lo Bianco

 

A

Venetian Lessons in Love by Jenna Lo Bianco is like a sumptuous Italian opera: fabulous settings, tragic heroine, evil villain and mysterious but gorgeous hero. Lucia has been known to all as l’Orfana since an intrusive photographer snapped a picture of her as an eleven year old child at the scene of the horrific accident which took the lives of her parents, along with others.

Now, twenty years later, Lucia is running what was her parents’ Italian language school from her inherited palazzo on the canal in Venice with the assistance of her two trusted friends, Mariela and Francesco. All is well in Lucia’s safe, secluded though lonely life until a blow is delivered which threatens to upset her fragile sense of well being.

A romantic, melodramatic story follows: Venice is an enchanting backdrop; Lucia is beautiful, vulnerable and, at times, maddeningly stubborn in her fear and mistrust of her handsome neighbour, Alex, with his intriguing, Australian-accented Italian.

This is a book for lovers of romantic fiction and, of course, Italy. Jenna Lo Bianco has written two previous books: The Italian Marriage and Love & Rome.

Published by Pan Macmillan.