The Shallow Seas
A tale of two cities: Singapore and Batavia
by Dawn Farnham
In this sequel to The Red Thread, Charlotte Macleod is nineteen, pregnant,
and alone in 1842. She is fleeing a scandalous liaison with her married
Chinese lover, a liaison which would bring ruin on him, herself, and her
brother, Robert, the police chief of Singapore. When Tigran Manouk,
forty, and the richest merchant in Batavia, capital of the Dutch East Indies,
asks for her hand in marriage, the choice is no choice.
Through loss and pain, Charlotte will find a way to make a life with a man
she does not love in a town she does not understand. Until she returns to
Singapore, to the town where the man she loves waits for her, to face the
hardest decision of her life.
Dawn Farnham was born in Portsmouth, England in 1949. Her parents emigrated to Perth, Western Australia when she was two. She grew up a sandgroper, barefoot and free, roaming the bushy suburbs and beaches with her friends. In the sixties she, like so many other young Aussies, left on a ship for London, aged 17. In the Swinging years she met and married her journalist husband and moved to Paris, learned French and lots of other things and travelled round Europe in a Volkswagen beetle. As a foreign correspondent, her husband was posted to exotic locations and they lived in China, Hong Kong, Korea and Japan in the eighties and nineties. During this time she raised two daughters and taught English. Back in London she went back to school, doing a B.A. in Japanese at The School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) and a Master's Degree at Kings College. She and her husband now live in Singapore. It is in this thriving port city-state that she found her muse and began to write, finding particular pleasure in its colourful and often wild past.
