Josephine's Garden
Stephanie Parkyn
ISBN: 9781760529833
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
Pub Date: December 2019

From the author of Into the World comes another beautifully complex, richly imagined historical novel.

She survived the most terrible prison in Paris, but would she survive her marriage to Napoleon?

France, 1794. In the aftermath of the bloody end to the French Revolution, Rose de Beauharnais stumbles from prison on the day she was to be guillotined. Within a decade, she'll transform into the scandalous socialite who marries Napoleon Bonaparte, become Empress Josephine of France and build a garden of wonders with plants and animals she gathers from across the globe. But she must give Bonaparte an heir or she risks losing everything.

The lives of two other women from very different social spheres are tied to the fate of the Empress Josephine. Marthes Desfriches has been widowed twice and is desperate to have a child when she enters a loveless marriage with an adversary of the Empress who despises her botanical ambitions. Anne Serreaux longs for a large family when she marries the man who becomes chief gardener for the Empress tasked with germinating the first Tasmanian blue gums in Europe. Each of these women faces obstacles in their relationships and in their quest to become mothers - experiencing trauma that will put all their lives at risk.

Josephine's Garden is about identity, obsession, love and marriage, and, ultimately, finding the courage to let go.

Author bio:

Stephanie Parkyn's first novel, Into the World, was published to wide acclaim in 2017. Stephanie always wanted to write fiction, growing up in a book-loving family in Christchurch, New Zealand. She had a rewarding career as an environmental scientist, but is now living her dream of writing stories and travelling to find them. She is fascinated by the human motivations behind the events of history and is particularly drawn to illuminating women's stories. After enjoying ten years living and exploring in Australia, she now writes from her home in a bush-clad valley in Coromandel Peninsula, New Zealand. Josephine's Garden is her second novel.