Author(s): Deborah Challinor

Fiction (NR)

A dazzling new series from bestselling historical fiction author Deborah Challinor, exploring the fascinating world of Victorian funeral customs and featuring Sydney's first female undertaker. Tatiana Caldwell's childhood in London is idyllic and filled with the love of doting parents. But when they die in quick succession, she's left heartbroken and destitute, and at seventeen emigrates to Sydney in 1864, determined to build a new, financially secure life for herself. After an apprenticeship as an undertaker's assistant with Crowe Funeral Services, Tatty marries owner Titus Crowe. Titus himself soon dies and Tatty inherits the business and becomes Sydney's only female undertaker.

But then rival funeral director Elias Nuttall, intent on acquiring Crowe Funeral Services, publicly accuses Tatty of deliberately poisoning Titus. She must find a way to stop him before he ruins her, and embarks on exposing Nuttall's own gruesome secrets, a mission that takes her from the cemetery at midnight, to house-breaking, to Sydney's criminal court, to the lunatic asylum.

Black Silk and Sympathy is a riveting and realistic story of Sydney in the 1860s, of death laid out in front rooms, of funeral processions and mortuary trains, and of survival, reinvention and determination.