CLAIM YOUR FREE AUSTRALIAN HISTORICAL FICTION NOVELLA 

Dublin, 1850. Sydney, Christmas Day 1851.

Maureen Murphy is a woman who made her own choices. She trained as a teacher at a Protestant institution against her Catholic family's wishes. She lived alone in Dublin. She paid her own rent. And on the day her landlord sent the caretaker away and locked the door behind him, none of that independence could protect her.

The law offered her nothing. Reporting the rape meant social ruin. Silence meant carrying it alone. Neither choice was clean, and Maureen knew it.

What follows is not a story about justice. It is a story about what a woman does when justice is not available to her. About the friend who goes to the warehouse alone and comes back with intelligence. About the midwife at the Rotunda Hospital who survived her own assault at fourteen and built something quiet and covert from the inside of an institution. About the schoolteacher who learns the full truth and stays.

And it is about the moral weight of silence. When do you tell the man who loves you what was done to you? When does protecting yourself become a burden you can no longer carry alone?

By Christmas 1851, Maureen is in Sydney with her husband Liam, their infant son Michael, and her brother John beside her. She got there. But the road from that Dublin lodging house to this Sydney kitchen was not straight, and it was not easy, and it cost her more than anyone around her knew.

This is how she walked it.

Sunlight Over Shadow is a companion to Unbound Justice, the first book in The Australian Sandstone Series. It tells the story John Leary never witnessed. Readers who have met Maureen in Book 1 will find here what she carried before she arrived in Sydney. It stands alone, but it rewards those who already know her brother's story.