SOME GIRLS ARE BORN TO BE LOVED,

SOME ARE BORN TO BE USEFUL,

AND SOME ARE BORN TO BE BAD ...

Indulged and wealthy Kat Fitzhubert is 'sold' in an arranged marriage and sent to a colony across the world. Lady Viola Montefiore is the dark-skinned 'changeling' of a ducal family, kept hidden and then shipped away. Titania Boot is as broad as a carthorse, and as useful.

On the long sea voyage from their homeland of England these three women are fast bonded in an unlikely friendship. In the turmoil of an Australia in the 1850s that reinvents itself from convict colony to a land of gold rushes and illusive riches, one woman forges a business empire and another brews illegal alcohol with a bushranger as the valleys and indigenous lands around her are destroyed. The third vanishes on her wedding day, in a scandal that will intrigue and mystify Sydney's polite society and beyond.

In this magnificent and broad-sweeping saga, award-winning author Jackie French defies the myth of colonial women as 'merely' wives, servants, petty thieves or whores. Instead, she portrays them as businesswomen, farmers, bushrangers and illegal brewers, as well as arbiters of a destiny far richer than the bewitching glitter and lure of gold.