Islands of Mercy

About the book

In 1865, in the polite drawing rooms of Victorian Bath, Jane Adeane discovers that the heart is rarely obedient.

Islands of Mercy follows Jane Adeane, a gifted nurse and the daughter of a respected surgeon, as she confronts the limits placed on her by r male expectations. When she turns down a proposal of marriage and forms a passionate bond with another woman, Jane is torn between security and secrecy.

Across the globe, in the jungles of nineteenth-century Borneo, the man Jane rejected pursues his own fraught journey, driven by rivalry, pride and longing. Meanwhile Clorinda Morrissey, newly arrived in Bath, attempts to fashion a life of independence from the fragments of her past.

A novel set between nineteenth-century England and the...