T he Ripping Tree Nikki Gemmell, by HarperCollins

Nikki Gemmell first conceived of this, her great Australian novel, more than a decade ago. “I was living in London, dreaming of the tall blue skies of home,” she tells The Weekly. “I moved back to Australia in a great rush of thankfulness. But then life crashed spectacularly into the writing process – a new baby arrived alongside several more books and the death of both my parents, which knocked me for six. But my protagonist, Tom, wouldn’t let me go. I returned again and again to her.” This haunting pageturner is the result.

“It’s an historical thriller, a big departure for me,” Nikki says. There are heartstopping moments and an undercurrent whodunnit that runs through to the final page. But it is the exquisite poetry of Nikki Gemmell’s language that soars.

The story is set in the early 1800s in the grand house of Willowbrae and follows seven days in the life of 16-year-old Thomasina – Tom – Trelora, the sole survivor of a shipwreck. She appears to have been literally washed up onto the doorstep of this family mansion in the Aussie bush.

Tom is the unruly daughter of an English recluse who learned everything at her father’s knee. Following his death, her brother decides to marry off independent Tom to a vicar in Australia and they board the Finbar for the other side of the world. But when the ship founders on rocks, Tom’s near-naked body is found by an Aboriginal man who carries her to safety and then disappears into the night ... So starts Tom’s new life in Willowbrae. She hides her identity, spying the chance to shape her own destiny, but very soon discovers there’s something extremely dark going on at Willowbrae.

Tom is a beguiling character, courageously battling against the gender inequity of the era and driven by an unquenchable moral compass. “I had to be careful not to make my Thomasina too modern,” notes Nikki. “She is a woman of her time, but she’s never learnt to cloak herself in a veneer of decorum, because she was raised in isolation by an eccentric father. So she was never taught respectable ‘womanly ways’. This gets her into a lot of trouble. She’s impetuous, clumsy, funny, indignant. I fell in love with her as I was writing and cried for her too as the world around her tried to break her spirit.”

Tom is especially resonant in current times and her passion to be heard strikes a telling chord. But it is also the evocative descriptions of Australia that pulsate through this novel and Nikki rightly calls it “my love letter to this glorious, complex, mighty land”.