The Rose of Sebastopol Book

Mariella, a young Victorian lady, spends her days sewing and writing to her surgeon fiancé, Henry, who has left England to serve in the Crimean War. Rosa, (as unlike her cousin Mariella in character as she is similar in appearance) also has ambitions to serve, as one of Florence Nightingale's new breed of nurses. Moustache twirling lothario, Max (Rosa's step brother) is a soldier (probably leading the charge of the Light Brigade, I forget the details) and appears to despise the Victorian primness of Mariella.

When Rosa disappears and Henry becomes ill, Mariella begs to be allowed to go the Crimea herself to nurse her fiancé and find her cousin. To her (and our) astonishment, she is given permission to make the journey and the four characters play out their story against the backdrop of one of the bloodiest conflicts in our history.

The plot is full of surprises and the historical detail is fascinating. But what I love most about this book is that, by the end of the story, each of the four characters has undergone an almost complete transformation. Each seems to have become almost the polar opposite of what we believed them to be in the beginning. This achievement by Katherine McMahon is all the more remarkable because it almost passes unnoticed. How did A, so smoothly and effortlessly, turn into B? How could we not have seen that about C? And who would have guessed D felt like that about A? The character development in this book is little short of masterful.

This is easily one of my favourite books of the last decade.