‘It got better, in time, though if she were to be truthful it always felt more of a duty than a pleasure: a little like homework, satisfying when over, and done well, but never exactly enjoyable. But then nobody had ever suggested it could be otherwise.’ This was the view of Claudia Faraday, respectable wife and mother of three, on the subject of sex. That is until an unexpected visit from a colleague of her absent husband’s shakes her out of her torpor in a most surprising, not to say unlikely way, and spurs her to start keeping a diary that has remained hidden for nearly 100 years. The diary reveals a woman venturing into the outside world of the 1920s with a fresh mind and an updated attitude, prompted to re-evaluate the lives of her family and her friends and, ultimately, herself. As she does so she discovers, as Marie Stopes might have said: Approached in the right way, even homework can be fun.

The Unlikely Adventures of Claudia Faraday

Romance

Trench, Patsy

Historical

Prefab Publications

"Set against the backdrop of the Australian migrant experience, 'The Worst Country in the World' is not only a great read but a thought-provoking one too, especially for those with links to Australia, which reinvented itself from a convict colony to one of the 'luckiest' countries in the world." Karen Clare, Family Tree magazine. In 1801 Mary Pitt, a 53-year-old widow and mother of five, left her home in Fiddleford in Dorset to sail across the world to live in a penal colony in a country that was then considered by its recent arrivals to be the worst country in the world. Colonial New South Wales was then barely fourteen years old, an experiment that looked as if it was going to fail. What on earth made her go there? The Worst Country in the World is a story about the early days of colonial Australia as seen through the eyes of Mary and her family of free settlers. It tells how the country that was originally considered not fit to be lived in struggled to become the 'lucky' country it is now. It is a personal story told by Mary's descendant, an Englishwoman who once lived in Australia and has a deep affection for it, whose own Australian mother reversed the wheel and migrated back to England to reinvent herself as the archetypal Englishwoman. It is about struggle and snobbery, reinvention and revaluation.

The Worst Country in the World: The true story of an Australian pioneer family

Biographies & Memoirs

Community & Culture

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Books by Prefab Publications