- Description
- About the Author
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Two audacious women; one remarkable man …
When Raffles sets sail from the cold, damp confines of Georgian London to make his name and fortune in the tropics, he takes with him his new wife, Olivia, a raffish beauty with a scandalous past. She infatuates both his closest friend, a poet, and one of his bitterest rivals, a soldier. Raffles sees what is going on, but he turns a blind eye – or so hopes Olivia.
After Olivia’s death, and back on leave in London, Raffles, a man once again in need of a wife, makes a practical marriage. Sophia, no beauty, but curious and intelligent, embraces the opportunity of an exciting life abroad. Marriage brings her great joy but also great sadness. Her life with Raffles becomes a catalogue of loss: of their children, of their possessions, of their savings.
And all the while, Raffles, driven and talented, manoeuvres at the centre of global networks of power, trade, politics and diplomacy. His scheming culminates, to his eventual glory, with the founding of a new trading post: Singapore. Transport yourself from London to equatorial Penang, Malacca, Java, Sumatra, and Singapore.
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Rosie Milne worked as a book editor in London before moving to New York, where she wrote her first novel, How to Change Your Life, about an editor of self-help books who tries to follow the advice in a self-help book.
She then moved to Hong Kong, where she wrote her second novel, Holding the Baby, about the way motherhood turns women’s lives upside down, and where she worked as a books columnist at the South China Morning Post.
Rosie then moved to her current home, Singapore, where for a time she wrote about the city for the UK Telegraph, and then set up Asian Books Blog.
Cover Type: Paperback
Page Count: 432
Year Published: 2015