Review by Stacey O’Carroll
Author: Siobhan O’Brien
Publisher: HarperCollins
RRP: $32.99
Release Date: 31 January 2024
“A vision projected itself onto the black screen of her memory, and she saw a time when the cottage was tranquil and filled with joy.”
How do you find hope, love or chase your dreams when a life you do not want has been planned out and must be followed? In Siobhan O’Brien’s historical fiction novel All The Golden Light, Adelaide Roberts is keen to follow in the footsteps of the suffragettes she reads about and live life on her terms rather than one dictated by her father. Set in 1918, at the end of the Great War, Adelaide awaits her brother’s return from Europe and hopes to meet him in Sydney to start a dress shop. However, on a trip with her father to the isolated NSW south coast island of Belowla, Adelaide falls in love with Emmett. Adelaide plans to marry Emmett, but much to her dismay, her father has arranged for her to marry the wealthy tobacco farmer Donal to save himself from financial ruin. When secrets are revealed, Adelaide must fight for her life and to return to her true love.
“He wanted her to find God and contemplate marriage. The Kaiser’s antics on the other side of the world meant her father could no longer afford to keep her.”
O’Brien partially sets her epic romance on the remote island of Belowla, NSW. While many Australian historical novels tend to be set in larger cities or familiar towns, O’Brien’s choice brings attention to the little island north of Bateman’s Bay on the NSW south coast. Her location allows her to bring something new to Australian historical fiction set in the early 1900s and provides a fresh perspective on the rural impact of the Great War. She immerses the reader in the beautiful coastal and farming locations whilst also showing the harsh and punishing reality of life in such remote places and the impact of war on returned soldiers.
“She’d drawn her inspiration from suffragette and bloomer advocate Alice Hawkins, who cycled around Leicester promoting the women’s rights movement.”
Apart from the locations, O’Brien’s references to suffragettes and Adelaide’s building independence were a joy to read. Adelaide’s hard life and fight for her love, and life were well written and showed the real-life challenge that many women faced at the time. The expectations for women to obey men, as shown by Adelaide’s circumstances, were still ongoing. While by 1918 women could vote, they were still fighting for their autonomy.
“Da’s father always joked his son must have been pickled in brine, he loved the sea that much.”
Although epic sagas are meant to be long, languid, immersive reads, the pacing did not quite meet expectations. It could be that I do not usually read sweeping Australian historical dramas, but I found the pacing a bit laboured and slow. O’Brien creates an epic whose emotional highs and lows follow the weather and the rise and fall of the ocean, yet in the middle of the narrative, the story seems to get stuck in a rip.
O’Brien clearly has a love for the South Coast, and her in-depth research weaves a novel that could easily be a historical biography, although a dramatic one. Each important historical topic she covers is done with finesse and finely stitched into the narrative. All The Golden Light is an enjoyable novel for lovers of Australian historical and romantic fiction.