'Sarah Erskine was the third generation of the McGowan tea planter family in India. Her life underwent a major upheaval when she was wrenched from the life she had known and, like so many 'expats' at that time, at age seventeen, she was sent 'home' to Glasgow. There, while being groomed for her entry into society, her life was spent among the entrepreneurial giants of Glasgow. Marriage took her again to plantation life during the dying days of the Caribbean sugar industry. Then, in the death throes of that industry, she returned to spend more than a decade in Glasgow during which she was widowed. A chance meeting with an old friend and his enthusiastic tales of an embryonic Australian sugar industry finally inspired her to leave Glasgow to make a new life for herself in a rough settlement on the bank of a river in a new country, and in a fledgling but familiar industry. Sarah's story takes the reader across five countries over the decades from the 1820s to the 1860s.' (Publication summary)
