Publisher's Synopsis
A mostly true, though somewhat embroidered, but highly entertaining, epic saga of a pair of ill-matched 18th Century English teenagers. Mary Bateman,14, is a survivor bought from an orphanage by a notorious, but hilariously awful Elizabeth Sully madam of a London brothel for paedophiles. Feisty Mary reluctantly becomes a whore-thief, is caught and sentenced to death for theft - but commuted to a lesser punishment - deportation. The countless men in her life include a gypsy onion-seller, Jose, a rent-boy fop, Jamie-boy - her great love - her 'sea-husband', Archie and sturdy, 17 year old naïve farm-boy, George Guest. Readied to hang for pig-rustling but reprieved at the very last minute, he is transported to Botany Bay, Australia. Jamie-boy, George and Mary are crammed into cruel convict transporters, he in the First Fleet, she on 'The Whore-ship', Lady Juliana. They endure pathos, privation, cruelty, perversion, rape, murder, jealousy, tragedy, heady adventure, deadly dangers. And there is sex - lots of it! Some quite bizarre. But there is, too, much comedy - even farce - for is not that the flip-side of tragedy? Their absorbing saga teems with an array of stunning characters: whores, madams, paedophiles, psychopaths, highwaymen, gentry, even royalty, ex-slaves turned bushrangers, bigoted judges, dodgy lawyers, thugs (often female), 'sea-husbands', castrati, aborigines, sadistic gaolers, saints and sinners, criminals galore - and, if that were not enough, the supernatural. With deadly foes hell-bent on their ruin, the teens and their staunch friends are finally thrown together by fate but en route - via Tenerife, Rio, Cape Verde, Cape Town - they must engage in epic battles to simply survive in a faraway and pitiless new world. One will prosper...one will die horribly...the other...?
