An enchanting and captivating novel about how our untold stories haunt us — and the stories we tell ourselves in order to survive.
After her family suffers a tragedy, nine-year-old Alice Hart is forced to leave her idyllic seaside home. She is taken in by her grandmother, June, a flower farmer who raises Alice on the language of Australian native flowers, a way to say the things that are too hard to speak.
Under the watchful eye of June and the women who run the farm, Alice settles, but grows up increasingly frustrated by how little she knows of her family’s story. In her early twenties, Alice’s life is thrown into upheaval again when she suffers devastating betrayal and loss. Desperate to outrun grief, Alice flees to the dramatically beautiful central Australian desert. In this otherworldly landscape Alice thinks she has found solace, until she meets a charismatic and ultimately dangerous man.
Spanning two decades, set between sugar cane fields by the sea, a native Australian flower farm, and a celestial crater in the central desert, The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart follows Alice’s unforgettable journey, as she learns that the most powerful story she will ever possess is her own.
An enchanting and captivating novel about how our untold stories haunt us — and the stories we tell ourselves in order to survive.
After her family suffers a tragedy, nine-year-old Alice Hart is forced to leave her idyllic seaside home. She is taken in by her grandmother, June, a flower farmer who raises Alice on the language of Australian native flowers, a way to say the things that are too hard to speak.
Under the watchful eye of June and the women who run the farm, Alice settles, but grows up increasingly frustrated by how little she knows of her family’s story. In her early twenties, Alice’s life is thrown into upheaval again when she suffers devastating betrayal and loss. Desperate to outrun grief, Alice flees to the dramatically beautiful central Australian desert. In this otherworldly landscape Alice thinks she has found solace, until she meets a charismatic and ultimately dangerous man.
Spanning two decades, set between sugar cane fields by the sea, a native Australian flower farm, and a celestial crater in the central desert, The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart follows Alice’s unforgettable journey, as she learns that the most powerful story she will ever possess is her own.
| Published By | House of Anansi Press Inc — Aug 7, 2018 |
| Specifications | 400 pages | 5.5 in x 8.5 in |
| Keywords | book club; womens fiction; abuse; mother daughter relationship; secret life of bees sue monk kidd; book club pick; botany; language of flowers; trauma; abusive relationships; family saga; healing; debut; women writers; women's literature; contemporary fiction; black and white illustrations; swimming lessons claire fuller; perfect rachel joyce; the naturalist alissa york; my name is lucy barton elizabeth strout; gifts for mom; mothers day; instagrammable cover; |
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Excerpt |
| Written By |
HOLLY RINGLAND is the author of the international bestseller The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart, which is being adapted into a seven-part TV series starring Sigourney Weaver and produced by Amazon Prime and Bruna Papandrea’s Made Up Stories. After living between Australia and the UK for ten years, Holly has been based in the Yugambeh region of southeast Queensland since 2020, where she wrote The Seven Skins of Esther Wilding in her “office,” a vintage caravan named Frenchie. hollyringland.com |
| Written By |
|
HOLLY RINGLAND is the author of the international bestseller The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart, which is being adapted into a seven-part TV series starring Sigourney Weaver and produced by Amazon Prime and Bruna Papandrea’s Made Up Stories. After living between Australia and the UK for ten years, Holly has been based in the Yugambeh region of southeast Queensland since 2020, where she wrote The Seven Skins of Esther Wilding in her “office,” a vintage caravan named Frenchie. hollyringland.com |
“This story about family, love, and reinvention is defiant in its sweetness and is stirring to its end.” —Foreword Reviews
What can I say about The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart that would live up to the beauty of the words in this book? … A gorgeous book inside and out.
” —A Couple Reads“An impressive coming-of-age debut.” —Baking Bookworm
“An engrossing novel imbued with passion and reverence for the Australian natural world, with a cast of characters that inspire affection in the reader even as they make mistakes.” —Books and Publishing
The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart is a book that glows — in the fire and heart of it; in the wonder and hope of it. Holly Ringland is a gifted, natural storyteller and her novel — about finding magic in the dark; about the power of freedom and the freedom of story — istruly a light-giving, tender thing. A vivid, compelling, utterly moving debut.
” —Brooke Davis, author of international bestseller Lost & Found, winner of 2015 ABIA Fiction Book of the YearNot everyone who visits the central Australian desert understands the landscape of it. Holly Ringland does and shares her heart instincts in this epic telling. Each page arrives to us like the first flight of the butterfly from its cocoon. The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart is a literary gift.
” —Ali Cobby Eckermann, Yankunytjatjara poet, 2017 Windham-Campbell winner.“This novel shines with courage, with heart, and with love. Infused with a tender ferocity, and the beauty and warmth of native flowers, it invokes great stories of loss, kindness and home.” —Ashley Hay, author of The Railwayman’s Wife, winner of the 2013 Colin Roderick Award