- a vibrant town drawing people from every corner of the earth where, with confidence and a flair for storytelling, a person can be whoever he or she wants. Almost. Ellen Thompson is young, vivacious and unmarried, with a six-month-old baby. Despite her fierce attachment to her family, boisterous and unashamed of their convict origins, Ellen dreams of marriage and disappearing into the ranks of the respectable. Then she meets Harry Woods. Harry, newly arrived in Hobart Town from Western Australia, has come to help his aging father, 'the Old Man of the Mountain' who for more than twenty years has guided climbers on Mount Wellington. Harry sees in Ellen a chance to remake his life. But, in Hobart Town, the past is never far away, never truly forgotten. When the past collides with Ellen's dreams, she is forced to confront everything in life a woman fears most. Based on a period in the lives of the author's great-great-grandparents, Sarah Ellen Thompson and Henry Watkins Woods, is not a romance but it is a story of love - a mother's love for her children, a woman's love for her family and, those most troublesome loves of all, for the men in her life. It is a story of the enduring strength of the human spirit.