Summer at Mount Hope
Rosalie Ham

From the author of bestseller The Dressmaker and upcoming novel The Year of the Farmer. Phoeba Crupp is a young woman who lives with her parents and sister on a small farm near Geelong in the 1890s. Her father is an eccentric ex-accountant who moved his family from the city in order to establish a vineyard, a decision her mother bitterly - and loudly - resents. While her sister makes a play for the local squatter's son, Phoeba is content with her best friend Harriet, until circumstances push her towards the world of men and money. Like Ham's first novel, The Dressmaker, Summer at Mount Hope is a black comedy which also contains a more serious strand about the efforts of a woman a century ago to be free.