Hello and welcome to this week's Tuesday Teaser. The place where we take a sneaky peek at the beginning of a book and decide if it has lured us into reading it.
The book this week is The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart by Holly Ringland.
Holly grew up on the east coast of Australia. In her early twenties, she worked for four years in a remote Indigenous community in Australia’s western desert, where she was the Senior Media ranger at Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park. Moving to England in 2009, Holly obtained her MA in Creative Writing from the University of Manchester in 2011.
After wanting to be a writer since she was three years old, Holly’s debut novel The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart was published in 2018 when she was 37 years old and has since become an international bestseller.
In May 2021, Amazon Prime Video announced their commission of a television series adaption of the book, to stream globally. Filming will take place in Australia, starting October 2021.
I hope you enjoy this short extract from the beginning of the book.
The Blurb
Flowers, fire and fairy tales are the elements that will forever shape nine-year-old Alice Hart's life, in The Lost Flower's of Alice Hart, the international bestseller by Holly Ringland.
Alice Hart lives in isolation by the sea, where her mother’s enchanting flowers and their hidden messages shelter her from the dark moods of her father. When tragedy changes her life irrevocably, nine-year-old Alice goes to live with the grandmother she never knew existed, on a native flower farm that gives refuge to women who, like Alice, are lost or broken. In the Victorian tradition, every flower has a meaning and, as she settles into her new life, Alice uses this language of flowers to say the things that are too hard to speak.
As she grows older, though, family secrecy, a devastating betrayal and a man who’s not all he seems, combine to make Alice realise there are some stories that flowers alone cannot tell. If she is to have the freedom she craves, she must find the courage to possess the most powerful story she knows: her own.
Chapter 1 - Black Fire Orchid
In the weatherboard house at the end of the lane, nine-year-old Alice Hart sat at her desk by the window and dreamt of ways to set her father on fire.
In front of her, on the eucalyptus desk her father built, a library book lay open. It was filled with stories collected from around the world about the myths of fire. Although a northeasterly blew in from the Pacific, full of brine, Alice could smell smoke, earth, and burning feathers. She read, whispering aloud:
The phoenix bird is immersed into fire, to be consumed by the flames, to burn ashes and rise renewed, remade, reformed - the same, but altogether different.
Alice hovered a fingertip over an illustration of the phoenix rising: its silver-white feathers glowed, its wings outstretched, and its head thrown back to crow. She snatched her hand away, as though the licks of golden, red-orange flames might singe her skin. The smell of seaweed came through her window in a fresh gust; the chimes in her mother's garden warned of the strengthening wind.
Leaning over her desk, Alice closed the window to just a crack. She pushed the book aside, eyeing the illustration as she reached for the plate of toast she'd made hours ago. Biting into a buttered triangle, she chewed the cold toast slowly. What might it be like, if her father was consumed by fire? All his monsters burnt to ash, leaving the best of him to rise, renewed by flames, remade into the man he sometimes was: the man who made her a desk so she could write stories.
ISBN: 978 1509859849
Publisher: Pan Macmillan
***
A brilliant opening line. I am very much looking forward to reading this book.
