Pink Gods and Blue Demons

In the diamond capital of the world, a woman counts her pearls and dreams of more. Loree Temple sits in a Kimberley hotel, draped in three hundred and sixty-five pearls (one for each day she has endured), while her husband Pat hunts for profit in the African sun. She has beauty, she has comfort, but she has never had a diamond. In a town built on stolen earth and fortunes made from a girl's best friend, Loree's hunger for something real becomes unbearable. Then Quelch arrives, charming and dangerous, intent on disrupting her careful life. A diamond appears in her possession through unclear means, and Loree must choose: return to her airless respectability, or keep the glittering proof that she is capable of something more than being a carcass dealer's wife. Stockley's 1920 novel crackles with the tension between desire and duty, ambition and morality, in a world where women were property and diamonds were power.