“A powerful concluding volume to the trilogy. At once an historical adventure, it is also filled with well-drawn and believable characters, who strive to find meaning in the lives they live. Many parts were very moving. Other parts - about education, politics, and faith - were thought-provoking. It contains much wisdom. I look forward to further writings from TJ Lovat.”
“The author’s passion for his characters and their lives permeates every single page of this vast historical saga. With action shifting between a sedate middle class estate in the Lancashire mill town of Burnley, to an often impoverished landscape in Catholic Ireland and then to the birth pangs of the British colony in Australia, the author handles an enormous cast of characters splendidly. I found the theological aspects of the new Australia particularly evocative and compelling. A perfect book for anyone who values the importance of the past and the best family saga I have read in a great many years.”
Jacobite Sons in New South Wales is the last book in the Trilogy that tracks the Lovat family from the devastation of the Jacobite Rebellion in the Scottish Highlands to their resettlement in Australia.
In the first book, Son of a Jacobite, Thomas is born on the day his father is killed at Culloden, marking the defeat by the Scots at the hands of the English. Growing up in Lancashire, he travels to Persia as a young man and discovers Islam. After joining the British Army, he serves in the American Wars, struggling with being a British Officer due to his rebellious Jacobite spirit, one he sees reflected in the American cause. In The Jacobite Grandson, Thomas takes his son, Edward, to Persia where Edward also comes to understand the Islamic world. Edward joins the Royal Navy and travels to New South Wales, struggling like his father with his rebellious heritage, especially as he sees the injustices meted out to the convicts and Indigenous peoples. In Jacobite Sons in New South Wales, Edward’s two sons, Thomas and Charles, migrate permanently to New South Wales, one as a pioneer educator, the other as a pioneer clergyman. It covers their own struggles with the sectarianism and divisions that characterised public and church life in the colony at the time.
Much factual history is inserted into the lives of all the key characters through events and people such as Thomas Jefferson, Sir Joseph Banks, Sir Arthur Philip and later governors of New South Wales. The history is coloured by the love lives, happy and sad, of all the main players.