The Colour of Our Country

The Secret Years

To escape her past, Frieda Carson has to reinvent her future, but estranged from the family she desperately wants to be a part of for fear of involving them, she has to move away from the dark shadows of her former life. Hiding away in Singapore, she starts climbing the corporate ladder of the international hotel chain, AmourOtel, where, looking for love in the wrong places only seeks to heighten her loneliness and takes her ever closer to a journey of self-destruction. The more she fights her own demons, the more lonely she becomes, trying to bury herself in the hedonistic world of corporate life, until, like a bomb blast in the night, her past confronts her when she least expects it.
From the screen of her distant laptop, Frieda can only watch her family grow in the seemingly idyllic sunshine of the vineyards of Martinborough. But they too face their own secrets, brought to light when Gina and Neil, on a mission to show five year old Madison, born to a surrogate, that she is really theirs. When DNA tests prove the opposite, turning their entire world upside down, they seek answers on a journey taking them to Oxford and the Isle of Arran in a bid to find answers and how the clinic could have got it so wrong.
In England, Hayley Dalgleish, close cousin to the sisters and surrogate to Madison, faces her own problems when she discovers the long held secret of her lover, Mitch, which takes her to the brink of financial disaster, but while she turns against him with a vengeance, she cannot deny him a place in her heart, or her bed.
Set in Singapore and England, this is the eighth book in the New Zealand/Aotearoa series ‘The Colour of Our Country’ and follows the fifth generation of the Murphy family. It is a story of surprise, desperation, hope and a willingness to never give up as secrets, when found out, destroy hopes and aspirations sending waves around the world. Secrets, some of which may go to the grave but others will take the family to the very edge of sanity where some may never recover but others will flourish.