Forgotten by history, buried by domesticity, two spirited women stitch the seams of a frayed family and a flawed society with fierce courage, even if it means doing what they thought impossible.
Beware the ordinary. It can upend your life.
In the smallness of daily life, powerful forces can rise up in the humblest disguise, sending us spinning into the unknown. For Melva, three onions set in motion terrible events. For Tam it's a dead fish with its cold eye.
The two wives of Irishman Cuddy Ranse couldn't be more different, one born on the red sands of Gibraltar, the other in the garret of a London bawdy house, each damned for the misfortune of being a woman and a bad one at that.
One is drawn by infatuation into marrying the young husband, the other ensnared when she's sixteen and he an old man. Though they never meet, their lives and legacy entwine in a dangerous new colony on the underbelly of the known world, the Great Southland.
Melva, always a foreigner, dares to buck expectations. Tam, shaped by cruelty, is driven by the urge to harm. Chained to the needs of others, each will discover too late that home is a crucible where they must face the heat, be forced to crack or emerge anew.
Based on real people and events of the 1800s and vividly told,
The Two Wives of Cuddy Ranse
is a searing story of the painful struggle to be true to yourself and love that can find us when we have given up hope.
It is a companion novel to
This Savage World.