Thanks to Allen and Unwin here is your chance to win one of 5 x copies of The Opal Dragonfly by Julian Leatherdale.

Inspired by the glamour and beauty of Elizabeth Bay House and the other grand villas of Woolloomooloo Hill in the 1850s, The Opal Dragonfly tells the story of Isobel Macleod, a young woman born into wealth and privilege and yet destined to be cast out of both.

Miss Isobel Clara Macleod, youngest of the seven children of Major Sir Angus Hutton Macleod, Surveyor-General of the colony of New South Wales, had the singular misfortune to know that at seven o'clock that morning her father was going to die.

September, 1851. Sydney, city of secrets and gossip. Seventeen-year-old Isobel Macleod is determined to save her father because she loves him. But when she dares to trespass in a forbidden male world, she will be plunged into social disgrace. A wave of ill fortune threatens to swallow up her family and their stately home, Rosemount Hall, 'the finest house in the colony' on the foreshores of Sydney Harbour.

Is Isobel to blame for her family's fate or does the cause lie further in the past? When Isobel was four, Major Macleod returned from an expedition with two 'souvenirs': an Aboriginal girl who became her friend and two opals fashioned into a dragonfly brooch for her mother.

When Isobel inherits this 'unlucky' heirloom, she wonders if the terrible dreams it summons are a curse or a gift. Now Isobel's hopes for her future depend on a charming bohemian who encourages her hidden passion to become an artist. Will she now be permanently exiled from her family home? Or will she be transformed into a new self, like a magnificent dragonfly emerging into the sunlight?

A daughter sacrifices her reputation, two men bid for the love of a woman, freedom is found in the heart of a dust storm, a father's legacy reveals past crimes.

Inspired by Elizabeth Bay House and the other grand villas of Sydney's Woolloomooloo Hill, The Opal Dragonfly tells the bittersweet story of an ambitious family's fall from grace and a brave young woman's struggle to find her true self.

Julian Leatherdale's first love was theatre. On graduation, he wrote lyrics for four comedy cabarets and a two-act musical. In 2017, he wrote the short play A Life in Ten Meals for the theatre project Breaking Bread. He discovered a passion for popular history as a staff writer, researcher and photo editor for Time-Life's Australians At War series. He later researched and co-wrote two Film Australia-ABC documentaries Return to Sandakan and The Forgotten Force and was an image researcher at the State Library of New South Wales. He was the public relations manager for a hotel school in the Blue Mountains where he lives with his wife and two children. His first novel Palace of Tears was published by Allen & Unwin in 2015 and HarperCollins Germany in 2016. His essay on the Hydro Majestic and Mark Foy was published on the Dictionary of Sydney website for the 2015 Blue Mountains Icons project. The Opal Dragonfly is his second novel.

The Opal Dragonfly
Allen and Unwin