A Rousing Historical Novel about Canadians-in-the-Making
London, 1870s. In a part of London were few reach their 20th birthday, newborn Katie stubbornly refused to die. As a starving street urchin she probably won’t beat the odds.
Enter Amelia Radmore, genteel, sheltered radical bent on child rescue. Attempting to raise funds, she unknowingly sets a battle of ambition wildly boiling from the lowest criminal dives to royalty itself.
Red Nell, a fearsome underworld potentate, gleefully fleeces Amelia’s charity.
Strawberry Rose, seizes the chance to dazzle London as a musical sensation. Too bad the price of success, when Bertie, Prince of Wales, steps lustily into the mix, becomes horrifyingly high.
Nouveau riche Louisa Crisp launches a desperate bid to social climb way out of her league while her sons, Adam and Henry, obsessed with Rose, fly violently at each other’s throats.
Through it all, Katie joins fellow cast-offs in a desperate struggle to stay alive. Will is a chimney sweep’s climbing boy, Cully, the rickety survivor of a cellar sweatshop, and Laura the pampered but illegitimate darling of an Elizabethan manor tossed out by greedy relatives.
Gullible, earnest Amelia remains their only hope. Will any of them ever escape the clutches of the Old World to grasp the promise of the New?
Check out the Cast of Characters
Order your copy now
Amazon
Print and Kindle Edition
Enjoy it on your Kindle e-reader.
I enjoyed this book so much I had to hop out of bed before dawn just to finish it.
Marybelle Mitchell
“I loved The Tomorrow Country. It’s a gripping, dramatic read from start to finish. It tells the story of four very different children thrown onto the trash-heaps of 1870s London and fighting to survive them, a young woman risking her way up the steps of society’s ladder as a salon singer while fighting off suitors and navigating a forbidden love, territorial wars between local overlords that echo Dickens’s The Adventures of Oliver Twist and cause havoc for the children, and the struggle of English charities to rescue them, with the plan to ship them off to the farmlands of Canada into the hoped-for safety of a healthy countryside and foster care. Almost everyone is plotting something, usually nefarious and dangerous, while the protagonists battle desperate odds. The period detail is vivid and realistic, the conflict constant and often breathtaking, with characters that run the gamut through all the shades of gray to black. Definitely a page-turner, something to keep one awake late into the night. I’m eagerly awaiting the sequel and trusting it will explore both a little-known period of Canadian history and the fates of Hamilton’s haunting characters.”
Kathryn Collins
I read The Tomorrow Country written by Gail Hamilton a month ago. I like to read and have read al ot of books now that I am retired. Most of these are soon forgotten but this particular book will stay with me for several reasons. Obviously much research has gone into the writing and you feel as if you are right there in the story. This is a subject that most of us have heard a little about but to have it laid out so clearly with so much detail of the day makes it more like a movie than a book.
After reading the book, my wife discovered that her grandmother was one of these little immigrants. She came to Canada as an 8 year old on the ship Dominion with 13 other children 8-12 years old and a minister, landing in Quebec to start her new life.
Looking forward to the next book.
Morris Yarrow