Place of Pines Kindle Edition

“I got so involved with the characters and their adventures that I simply couldn’t put it down. I read it in bed, at the breakfast table, in the bath, on the beach…and I especially loved learning how the pioneer settlers in the early 20th Century coped with the changes they found after leaving Europe. I was very sorry to reach the end.” –Mary S. Lovell, bestselling biographer and author of The Riviera Set and The Churchills.

Biographer of historical Australians and Australian houses, author Judith M Brown has deftly combined her love of 20th century history, Australia and France in her first and epic novel. Beginning in England in 1913, where we meet the young heroine, Isabelle Waterfield, Place of Pines sweeps through two generations, the Depression in Australia and the Resistance in France during World War II.

Isabelle is forced to give up the love of her life to marry her father's choice, James Manners, the son of his great friend Lord Manners. When James is drummed out of the Royal Horse Guards for being drunk on duty on New Year's Eve, Lord Manners sends the young couple to a sheep station he owns in the Mid North of South Australia.

There, Isabelle is still trying to adjust to the harshness of the Australian bush when war is declared on the other side of the world. Unable to rejoin the British Army, James enlists in the Australian Imperial Force and is sent to Gallipoli. Left alone on the property, Isabelle falls in love with its manager, Michael Barton, a Boer War veteran who is medically unfit for this war. If James returns, Isabelle will have to decide her future...