The Rose Grower - Softcover

De Kretser, Michelle

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0701169176 ISBN 13: 9780701169176

Publisher: Chatto & Windus, 1999

Synopsis

Good: A copy that has been read, but remains in clean condition. All pages are intact, and the cover is intact (including dust cover, if applicable). The spine may show signs of wear. Pages can include limited notes and highlighting, and the copy can include "From the library of" labels.Some of our books may have slightly worn corners, and minor creases to the covers. Please note the cover may sometimes be different to the one shown.

About this title

Product Description:

Set at the start of the French Revolution, a woman's private passion is her search to create a repeat-flowering crimson rose. An American falls in love with her sister and she is torn between ethics, reason, revolutionary zeal and unrequited love.

Review:

14th July 1789, Montsignac, Gascony. The Saint-Pierre family is caring for American artist Stephen Fletcher after he's fallen from his balloon, and landed in a haystack. Jean-Baptiste de Saint- Pierre is a magistrate with three daughters. Claire, the eldest, is beautiful and married (in a way that seems to require little personal involvement) to the odious and malodorous aristo Hubert. Sophie is plain, single, intelligent, good, competent and obsessed with growing roses. And Mathilde is eight and entertainingly precocious: when Stephen remarks on how he adores children because "'They are so ...innocent and yet so perceptive in their apprehension of the world'", Matty dismisses him instantly. " 'Oh no--another Rousseauist,' said the child with unconcealed disappointment. 'I'm not like that at all.' " And then there's Brutus, the dog who "only bites people whose smell he doesn't like."...

But the Saint-Pierres' existences--like those of everyone else in the locality--are about to fracture as the Revolution gathers momentum and the shockwaves from Paris push out into the provinces. The book's epigraph: "Small change, small change"-- Napoleon Bonaparte's comment on surveying the dead on a battlefield--signals this to be a novel of small people caught up in big events. And, indeed, Michelle de Kretser takes us from the co-operative and optimistic start of the Revolution as it manifests in Montsignac, through factionalisation, fanaticism and Terror, denunciations and betrayals, through love and loyalty to a quiet, damaged aftermath, with a vivid cast of surprising heroes, unexpected villains and not-quite-innocent bystanders.

The Rose Grower is a hypnotically engrossing novel that illuminates the biggest of issues with the lightest, most fragrant of touches. --Lisa Gee

About this edition

• Publisher: Chatto & Windus
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0701169176
• ISBN 13: 9780701169176
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 303