PENGELLY'S DAUGHTER

The novel is based in Cornwall, 1793. It is a year of turmoil. England is at war with France. Radicals and dissenters are joining forces with the Jacobins and it is not the time to challenge those in authority. Rosehannon Pengelly knows this to her cost. Her father's bankruptcy was only a matter of time and his death in gaol has left his wife and daughter reeling. Rosehannon's mother is a competent seamstress and has found work with a French dressmaker. Rosehannon, with her education, is trying to make a living as a bookkeeper. Rosehannon has always believed Mr Tregellas responsible for the theft of her father's cutter and is determined to find proof to implicate him. Dressed in men's clothes, she leaves the house at midnight. On the top of the cliff, she stumbles across a sailor, fleeing from an angry mob and on the spur of the moment, decides to help him. That decision seals her fate, throwing her together with a man she knows to be untrustworthy. Even as she falls in love with him, she questions who he really is. Rosehannon has to curb her hatred of those in power and fight to clear her father's name. Then she must make her choice. The harvest moon is huge and golden as she leaves the house for the last time. Above her, the stars are pointing the way as clear as any chart. The wind is blowing steadily from the west, smelling of oceans she would cross and lands she would now visit. She knows there will be no turning back

NICOLA PRYCE was born in Denver, Colorado, spending most of her childhood in Baghdad and Rome. A strict boarding school and no television, saw her reading almost everything she could lay her hands on – usually under the bedclothes, often in orchestra practice. She trained as a nurse in St Bartholomew's Hospital and her nursing career has always been important to her. But her love of literature made her yearn for more. At 42, she completed an Open University degree and qualified as a literacy support worker. She lives with her husband in a Somerset longhouse. They love sailing the south coast of Cornwall – nothing too heroic, just popping into the most romantic harbours you will ever find. It's still there – the romance, the adventure. Everything she read about as a child. Pengelly's Daughter is her first novel.