'Sixteen-year-old Mikaela has grown up isolated and homeschooled on an apple orchard in south-eastern Tasmania, until an unexpected event shatters her family. Eighteen months later, she and her older brother Kurt are running a small business in a timber town. Miki longs to make connections and spend more time in her beloved forest, but she is kept a virtual prisoner by Kurt, who leads a secret life of his own.
'When Miki meets Leon, another outsider, things slowly begin to change. But the power to stand up for yourself must come from within. And Miki has to fight to uncover the truth of her past and discover her strength and spirit. Set in the old-growth eucalypt forests and vast rugged mountains of southern Tasmania, The Orchardist's Daughter is an uplifting story about friendship, resilience and finding the courage to break free.'
Source: Publisher's blurb.
'Here we are, in a freezing valley covered in grass and edged by snow-bothered mountains, sitting nearer to the bottom of the world than just about everyone. It’s a still winter day—fog blocks the morning and the air is nearly tactile. We’re not far from Hobart, but every hill between us is another door opening to chilled air; just like the airport, to come home is to step outside. We’re that much closer to the wet and windy south-west, where muddy buttongrass plains give way to tangles of green scrub and an audience of endless peaks. We’re a long way from the major urban centres, and glad to be. The air is worth breathing, the high places worth climbing and the world is worth touching with our hands. But what does this mean for our writing?' (Introduction)
'In The Orchardist’s Daughter — the fourth novel for Canberra-based writer and veterinarian Karen Viggers — we find ourselves in a small timber town in southern Tasmania. Tasmania is also the setting for Viggers’s second novel, The Lightkeeper’s Wife, which made her a literary sensation in France, with more than 500,000 copies sold.' (Introduction)
'In The Orchardist’s Daughter — the fourth novel for Canberra-based writer and veterinarian Karen Viggers — we find ourselves in a small timber town in southern Tasmania. Tasmania is also the setting for Viggers’s second novel, The Lightkeeper’s Wife, which made her a literary sensation in France, with more than 500,000 copies sold.' (Introduction)
'Here we are, in a freezing valley covered in grass and edged by snow-bothered mountains, sitting nearer to the bottom of the world than just about everyone. It’s a still winter day—fog blocks the morning and the air is nearly tactile. We’re not far from Hobart, but every hill between us is another door opening to chilled air; just like the airport, to come home is to step outside. We’re that much closer to the wet and windy south-west, where muddy buttongrass plains give way to tangles of green scrub and an audience of endless peaks. We’re a long way from the major urban centres, and glad to be. The air is worth breathing, the high places worth climbing and the world is worth touching with our hands. But what does this mean for our writing?' (Introduction)
