Canvas (Novel) by Sarah Hope

Filled with tales of hidden love, dark family secrets, and chance encounters, Canvas is a sharply observed and compelling family drama, interwoven across generations and set in the heart of Australia’s iconic grazing country.

Alice McKinley inherits Dunedin, the family’s crumbling pastoral estate in Victoria’s Western District and soon discovers the sprawling sheep station is on the brink of bankruptcy.

A posthumous gift from her grandmother, Cecily reveals a Pandora’s box of riddles, clues and cryptic correspondence, including a journal written by her ancestor, Florence.

Alice is catapulted into a frantic search for something she’s not even sure is real — a missing masterpiece, commissioned by her family in the 1870s. It’s an heirloom rumoured to be worth millions and would save Dunedin from financial ruin.

As Alice delves deeper into the family archives, she uncovers more than she bargained for — a tangled web of intrigue stretching from the giddy world of colonial squattocracy, the wool boom of the 1950s and the realities facing rural families in the new millennium. Can she save her family’s great legacy?

Time is running out...

Canvas is Australian author, Sarah Hope’s debut novel.
Paperback, 540 pages

Publisher: Bowman & Hawkes
IBSN-13: 9780648297901