Author Description

A sublimely engrossing novel about idealism and exile, Promised Lands tells the powerful stories of two men of principle, charting their lives two centuries apart. Royal Marine Lieutenant William Dawes, an idealistic young officer, set sail for Australia in 1788 with dreams of establishing a Utopian society, where the convict settlers on his ship and the Aborigines will learn from each other and live in unity. His modern counterpart, Stephen Beech, a history professor with radical ideas for transforming his school, is researching Dawes's life and the early days of the Botany Bay settlement. As Beech learns the harsh truths about the settlement -- the failure of colonialist policies, the ravages of smallpox, and the degradation of the convicts -- he struggles to understand his own failed efforts to implement his Utopian educational theories.Beech's wife, Olla, rejects her husband's views and creates her own Utopian worldview, in which their apparently handicapped son, Daniel, is in possession of extraordinary powers and is destined to become mankind's savior: The truth is Daniel. The truth is genocide and starvation. The truth is the concentration camps and torturers; illness, pain.... The long scream of history goes on, and doesn't pause to draw breath.Part A Good Man in Africa, part The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, this absorbing novel brilliantly re-creates the early days of the European settlers in Australia and weighs the moral implications of creating brave new worlds.Meticulously constructed...Promised Lands is a strong, thoughtful novel...as much about the writing of fiction as it is about the seductive dangers of innocence and idealism. -- The New York Times BookReview