The Rose Grower

The year is 1789. It's the fourteenth of July, and at the opening of this striking first novel an American balloonist, Stephen Fletcher, falls out of the cloudless French sky. He lands in the pastoral world of a Gascon magistrate and his three daughters -- the precocious Mathilde, whose wit delights him; the angelical Claire, whose beauty enchants him; and the tall, plainspoken Sophie, whose extraordinary rose garden wins his admiration but not his love. With them, Stephen is caught up in the confusing early days of the French Revolution. If the rumor and news of the cataclysmic series of events initiated by an unruly mob in Paris at the Bastille at first seem distant from quiet Gascony, the spirit of revolution soon proves to be contagious, especially for Joseph Morel, a principled young physician who has been spared the drudgery of a servant's fate by a wealthy benefactor. While his reason grapples with his revolutionary zeal, his heart yearns for the love that Sophie has already committed to an indifferent Stephen. In the course of the novel's splendidly recounted five calamitous years, fire, murder, riots, and terror sweep through the French countryside and eventually into the lives of the sisters Saint-Pierre. With tragedy looming, Sophie strives to fulfill a passion more compelling than her dream of love or the politics of revolution: to create an original repeat-flowering crimson rose.