Author(s): Jenny Pattrick

NZ historical fiction

The compelling story of Rose in the best-selling Denniston novels has drawn thousands of people to explore the abandoned settlement on the South Island's remote West Coast. The original inhabitants braved a 2000-feet-high and terrifyingly steep incline, a severe climate and scarce resources to eke out a living from the seams of coal on the Hill. Their unique lifestyle has been brought alive in DENNISTON ROSE and HEART OF COAL. It has also been documented in the rich collections of historic photographs and artefacts of the place and its people, collected here to illustrate these two moving and vivid novels. They take us from the 1880s, as the young Rose struggles to find a place for herself amongst the tough, makeshift community on the high plateau, and through into the nineteenth century, as Rose blossoms into adulthood and is torn between her love affairs with two men and the bleak landscape of Denniston. In this illustrated novel the raw truth of the photographic past illuminates the reader's own imagination. In addition images of past times are paired with those of today to highlight the change from crowded settlements to ghost town.