Book description
The number one bestseller. The bleak coal-mining settlement of
Denniston, isolated high on a plateau above New Zealand's West Coast, is
a place that makes or breaks those who live there. At the time of this
novel - the1880s - the only way to reach the makeshift collection of
huts, tents and saloons is to climb aboard an empty coal-wagon to be
hauled 2000 feet up the terrifyingly steep Incline - the cable-haulage
system that brings the coal down to the railway line. All sorts arrive
here to work the mines and bring down the coal: ex-goldminers down on
their luck; others running from the law or from a woman or worse. They
work alongside recruited English miners, solid and skilled, who scorn
these disorganised misfits and want them off the Hill. Into this chaotic
community come five-year-old Rose and her mother, riding up the Incline,
at night, during a storm. No one knows what has driven them there, but
most agree the mother must be desperate to choose Denniston; worse, to
choose that drunkard, Jimmy Cork, as bedfellow. The mother has her
reasons and her plans, which she tells no one. The indomitable Rose is
left to fend for herself, struggling to secure a place in this tough and
often aggressive community. The Denniston Rose is about isolation and
survival. It is the story of a spirited child, who, in appalling
conditions, remains a survivor. Jenny Pattrick is a writer and former
jeweller whose six published novels, including The Denniston Rose, its
sequel Heart of Coal, the Whanganui novel Landings, and Inheritance, set
in Samoa, have all been number one bestsellers in New Zealand. In 2009
she received the New Zealnd Post Mansfield Fellowship. In 2011 she and
husband, musician Laughton Pattrick, published the children s book and
CD of songs, The Very Important Godwit.
