Author(s): Brad Bradley

Historical Fiction

Based on the life of John W. Harris, earliest settler of Poverty Bay; he goes to sea at an early age, works as a convict overseer in NSW where he encounters the infamous Samuel Marsden and his wife is killed by native reprisals. Later he trades around the NZ coastline and marries high-born Tukura. The clash of Harris' rationality with religious and superstitious beliefs in Maori and European society leads to dire consequences as his world is turned upside down by the deaths and betrayals of the women he loves, and finally the Hauhau and Te Kooti rebellion. Throughout, Harris fights to hold onto his Garden of Eden, his ideals and his sanity against an army of fanatical fundamentalists, in a confrontation of different moral perspectives. A memorable and controversial story of love, war and peace, kindness and cruelty, rationality and fanatical ideologies, Maori dark arts, hatred, anguish and revenge.