Wild Latitudes

After the unusual death of their papa, Adele Overend and her younger brother Godwin are dispatched from comfortable Autumn Hall in Yorkshire to the uttermost ends of the earth…

To gold rush Dunedin in 1864.

Even worse for the grieving pair, they must travel on separate vessels.

Adele Overend soon finds herself mysteriously cast upon a seemingly deserted shore; her last memory is of dining with the captain and other distinguished guests aboard the Yorkshire Witch, the ship which took her to the ‘new Eden’.

With no recollection of how she came to be washed up upon the shore, Adele must find her own way.

Although, self-possessed, determined, practical and, of course, beautiful, Adele is sure that this will be no problem.

Godwin arrives on the rim of civilisation to find his sister vanished and nobody willing to employ what they consider to be an unusually pretty boy.

Their adventures lead them into a series of mishaps and self-reinventions as they begin to adapt to their new lives…

With an unlikely cast of characters, and a large dose of adventure Wild Latitudes is an alluring and emotive fusion of the Shakespearean and the Victorian, the gothic and the melodramatic.

Praise for Barbara Else

‘Skilful, involving and enjoyable’ – New Zealand Herald

Barbara Else is the author of five best-selling novels and has edited several anthologies of children’s stories. Her first novel The Warrior Queen was short listed for the Montana New Zealand Book Award and her second, Gingerbread Husbands, for the Booksellers BookData Award. She has been Writer in Residence at Victoria University of Wellington, and has held a Creative New Zealand Scholarship in Letters. She is also a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit for Services to Literature. With her husband, Barbara also runs an advisory service for writers.