14th July 1789, Montsignac, Gascony. The Saint-Pierre family is caring for American artist Stephen Fletcher after he's fallen from his balloon, and landed in a haystack. Jean-Baptiste de Saint- Pierre is a magistrate with three daughters. Claire, the eldest, is beautiful and married (in a way that seems to require little personal involvement) to the odious and malodorous aristo Hubert. Sophie is plain, single, intelligent, good, competent and obsessed with growing roses. And Mathilde is eight and entertainingly precocious: when Stephen remarks on how he adores children because "'They are so ..."innocent" and yet so perceptive in their apprehension of the world'", Matty dismisses him instantly. " 'Oh no--another Rousseauist,' said the child with unconcealed disappointment. 'I'm not like that at all.' " And then there's Brutus, the dog who "only bites people whose smell he doesn't like."...
But the Saint-Pierres' existences--like those of everyone else in the locality--are about to fracture as the Revolution gathers momentum and the shockwaves from Paris push out into the provinces. The book's epigraph: "Small change, small change"-- Napoleon Bonaparte's comment on surveying the dead on a battlefield--signals this to be a novel of small people caught up in big events. And, indeed, Michelle de Kretser takes us from the co-operative and optimistic start of the Revolution as it manifests in Montsignac, through factionalisation, fanaticism and Terror, denunciations and betrayals, through love and loyalty to a quiet, damaged aftermath, with a vivid cast of surprising heroes, unexpected villains and not-quite-innocent bystanders.
"The Rose Grower" is a hypnotically engrossing novel that illuminates the biggest of issues with the lightest, most fragrant of touches. --"Lisa Gee"