Story of a New Zealand River

The year is somewhere in the early 1900s. A black punt cuts through the waters of the Kaipara Harbour, carrying Alice Roland, her wild daughter Asia, and the man who will change their lives upriver to a raw kauri logging settlement. Alice is English to her core: proud, puritanical, proper. Her husband Tom Roland is the boss of this place, a rough colonial whose timber empire rises from the very earth they're traversing. She arrives with her piano, a symbol of everything she's left behind and everything she refuses to surrender. The half-built cottage awaits, filled with a strange congregation of gentry and scoundrels, and at its heart: David Bruce, handsome and cultured, whose presence cracks open everything Alice has压制ed. Mander writes with fierce intelligence about desire in a place where the forests are being devoured by progress and something ancient is dying. This is colonial New Zealand before it found itself, and a woman who arrives knowing exactly who she is but has no idea who she might become.