Arcadia

1842: Two families, the once-wealthy Jamiesons, the poverty-stricken Dunbars, are drawn across thousands of miles of ocean from the waters of the Clyde to the new -found land the first emigrants called paradise.

Across the rolling deck of the barque New Zealand, Edward Jamieson catches his first sight of Jessie Dunbar, and a love story begins

Arcadia is that love story. Spanning a decade of hope and hardship, it reaches from the streets of Edinburgh and the docks of London, the Paisley of the weavers and the India of the nabobs, to New Zealand in its pioneering days. Elizabeth laird, born in New Zealand, has written a dazzling account of the fictional adventures of the earliest settlers there.