'From one of Australia's foremost journalists, Luke Slattery, comes a bravura literary achievement, a rich and intense novel of an imagined history of desire, ambition and dashed dreams, and a portrait of one passionate, unforgettable woman - Elizabeth Macquarie.
'Elizabeth Macquarie, widow of the disgraced former Governor of New South Wales, Lachlan Macquarie, is in mourning - not only for her husband, but the loss of their shared dream to transform the penal colony into a bright new world. Over the course of one long sleepless night on the windswept isle of Mull, she remembers her life in that wild and strange country; a revolution of ideas as dramatic as any in history; and her dangerous alliance with the brilliant, mercurial Francis Greenway, the colony's maverick architect.
'A stirring, provocative and thrilling novel of passion, ideas, reforming zeal and desire.'
Epigraph: For we are, all of us, small men. But in this new world we may become giants. - Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels
There's an old story...which may or may not be true. - Euripides, Helen
''Mrs M’ is the second wife of Lachlan Macquarie, governor of New South Wales from 1810 to 1821. Luke Slattery explains in his Author’s Note the impulse behind his novel – Elizabeth Macquarie’s voice coming to him, romantically, in a dream. It was not quite unprompted. He had been visiting her home territory in the Hebrides, having already written a short book about the Macquaries’ last years in New South Wales (The First Dismissal [2014]). But this book is different; and it is Slattery’s first novel.' (Introduction)
'When I lived in Sydney, one of my favourite places was Mrs Macquarie’s Chair, a stony seat cut into a promontory beyond the Royal Botanic Garden with a view from the Opera House and Harbour Bridge past Fort Denison and on towards the harbour heads. The land’s edge there has no boardwalks, no neatly set seawalls.' (Introduction)
'When I lived in Sydney, one of my favourite places was Mrs Macquarie’s Chair, a stony seat cut into a promontory beyond the Royal Botanic Garden with a view from the Opera House and Harbour Bridge past Fort Denison and on towards the harbour heads. The land’s edge there has no boardwalks, no neatly set seawalls.' (Introduction)
''Mrs M’ is the second wife of Lachlan Macquarie, governor of New South Wales from 1810 to 1821. Luke Slattery explains in his Author’s Note the impulse behind his novel – Elizabeth Macquarie’s voice coming to him, romantically, in a dream. It was not quite unprompted. He had been visiting her home territory in the Hebrides, having already written a short book about the Macquaries’ last years in New South Wales (The First Dismissal [2014]). But this book is different; and it is Slattery’s first novel.' (Introduction)
