Echoes From a Distant Land

Claire McIntyre has it all: an adoring husband, a bubbly best friend, a chic townhouse and a high-flying corporate career in the city. But somehow shes forgotten what really makes her happy.

After receiving tragic news, closely followed by the loss of her job, Claires world is thrown into turmoil. She is then forced to reconsider everything that matters to her.

Claire soon finds herself back at the very place shes been running from the family property. A place where the bush telegraph exposes every secret, where reputations are hard won and easily lost, and where fortune is as fickle as the weather.

Here, in the rugged beauty of the Australian Adelaide Hills, Claire starts to rebuild her life with her friends, her father and his beloved racehorses including a promising young horse called Paycheque.

After hard luck and heartbreak, Sunny finally finds a place to call home—in the middle of an Afghanistan war zone. There, the thirty-eight-year-old serves up her American hospitality to the expats who patronize her coffee shop, including a British journalist, a “danger pay” consultant, and a wealthy and well-connected woman. True to her name, Sunny also bonds with people whose language and landscape are unfamiliar to most Westerners, but whose hearts and souls are very much like our own: the maternal Halajan, who vividly recalls the days before the Taliban and now must hide a modern romance from her ultratraditional son; and Yazmina, a young Afghan villager with a secret that could put everyone’s life in jeopardy. In this gorgeous first novel, New York Times bestselling author Deborah Rodriguez paints a stirring portrait of a faraway place where—even in the fog of political and social conflict—friendship, passion, and hope still exist. 
 
Originally published as A Cup of Friendship
 
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On a balmy midsummer's evening in 1923, a young woman – foreign, dishevelled and heavily pregnant – is found unconscious just off the railway tracks in the tiny logging community of Woody Creek.

The town midwife, Gertrude Foote, is roused from her bed when the woman is brought to her door. Try as she might, Gertrude is unable to save her, but the baby lives.

When no relatives come forth to claim the infant, Gertrude's daughter Amber – who has recently lost a son in childbirth – and her husband Norman take the child in. In the ensuing weeks, Norman becomes convinced that God has sent the baby to their door, and in an act of reckless compassion and lonely desperation, he names the baby Jennifer and registers her in place of his son.

Loved by some but scorned by more, including her stepmother and sister, Jenny survives her childhood and grows into an exquisite and talented young woman. But who were her parents?

Spanning two momentous decades and capturing rural Australia's complex and mysterious heart, Pearl in a Cage is the unputdownable new novel by one of our most talented storytellers.