This book is one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever read.

The immediate appeal to me was that it revolved around Welsh folklore and even had snippets of Welsh in it (best yet, totally correct Welsh and not the usual Google Translate booboos), but it’s so much more than that.

It’s set in the steerage of an emigrant ship headed from London to Australia, poorer people from the UK are heading out for what they hope will be a better life with more opportunities, they all have different reasons for the journey but they all share the same hopes for freedom from poverty.

Cramped in the steerage compartment without relief from the conditions, they suffer from all the afflictions you’d expect – claustrophobia, seasickness and typhus. The dynamics between the different people below decks are very real, they do snap at each other but they try their best to get along.

The story is told from the perspective of Bridie, a teenage girl who has lost her father and is unhappy that her mother is remarried and now pregnant. She’s moody and stubborn but when she meets a Welsh couple on board the ship, they help her see the world through different eyes through the sharing of folktales and general sensible-ness.

This book is a tearjerker, so much so that I regretted reading it in work but couldn’t put it down… thankfully nobody caught me having a little sniffle to myself.

Corbett has written her story and characters beautifully, she’s done her homework about the period in time and the cultures involved so it feels to real – my favourite part is that she manages to show the place that fairytales have in our lives, even when we’re meant to be ‘grown up’.

About the Author

When Elizabeth Jane Corbett isn’t writing, she works as a librarian, teaches Welsh at the Melbourne Welsh Church, writes articles for the Historical Novel Review and blogs at elizabethjanecorbett.com.

In 2009, her short-story, Beyond the Blackout Curtain, won the Bristol Short Story Prize. Another, Silent Night, was short listed for the Allan Marshall Short Story Award. Her historical coming-of-age novel, The Tides Between, was published by Odyssey Books in October 2017.

Elizabeth lives with her husband, in a renovated timber cottage in Melbourne’s inner-north. She likes red shoes, dark chocolate, commuter cycling, and reading quirky, character driven novels set once-upon-a-time in lands far away.