My Heart at Evening

1832, Van Diemen's Land. A troubled envoy, sent on Governor Arthur's orders, travels up from Hobart Town to Circular Head, today's Stanley, to learn why Henry Hellyer took his own life. Hellyer was the Van Diemen's Land Company's surveyor, an amateur botanist and painter, and a friend of the woman married to the company's senior man in the region. Sleeping in the dead man's room, the narrator meets a tangle of lies, slurs, petty malice and tampered letters, while struggling with his own private torments. Around the mystery the book draws the violence of the young colony: the killing of Aboriginal people and the taking of their land, the cruelty shown to convicts and the greed of a chartered company, together with questions of power, male loyalty, desire and loneliness.

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About the book

Form

Novel

Genres

Historical, Crime (assigned by AI)

Set in

Australia, 1832

First published

2025

ISBN

9781764086509 (Evercreech Editions, Australia)