Original AI-generated book

The Last Kiln at Connor's Ridge

About this book

In March 1893, in the hop country of Tasmania's Derwent Valley, Maeve Connor is twenty-one, copper-haired and sharp-tongued, and newly fatherless. Declan Connor burns to death in his own hop kiln at the height of the drying season, and within a week Maeve learns that the ground her family bled for is not theirs at all: the deed to Connor's Ridge sits in trust with the Hollisters, the valley's oldest money, who mean to take it back and scrub the Connor name off forty years of hard-won respectability. With her mother's lungs failing and her thirteen-year-old brother's future in the balance, Maeve starts asking the one question nobody in the valley will answer — why a transported Irish convict was ever granted that ridge in the first place, and what the Hollisters walled into the kiln's foundation stones in 1853. A hundred years later, in the drought summer of 1993, Tess Connor comes home at twenty-four with her reputation in pieces after an affair with her married thesis advisor. She has a grandmother to bury, an estate to settle, and a ruined farm nobody wants except a Hollister with a tourism brochure. Behind a collapsed kiln wall she finds a soldered tin: letters written in 1893, a convict's deposition, and a gentleman's signet ring. What the tin says about her family is not the story she has spent four years learning how to tell, and the ground it points to belongs to people whose claim is older than either family's. Across two seasons a century apart, two women measure what a name is worth, whose word a court will hear, and what it costs to inherit a place — told through Maeve's fight, Tess's excavation, and the sworn statement of a mason who mixed mortar by lamplight in 1853.