The Ballad of Desmond Kale by Roger McDonald

Book Description

Secondhand. Very good condition. Minor smudge on right foredge.

The Ballad of Desmond Kale is Roger McDonald's broad-sweeping novel of the first days of British settlement in Australia.

At the centre is Stanton's pursuit of Kale - an Irish political prisoner and a rebelliously brilliant breeder of sheep.

The alchemy of wool fascinates, threatens, and transforms when it is discovered that fine wool thrives in New South Wales as nowhere else in the world, producing veritable gold on sheep's backs.

The laying to waste of Spain (Britain's chief supplier of fine wools) at the end of the Napoleonic wars, opens vast new opportunities for supply.

The Ballad of Desmond Kale is both a love story of unusual interest and an epic novel of greed, ambition, conceit, and redemption. The novel is rich in its characterisations and the rawness of its setting. (publisher blurb)