The Assayer’s Wife
A wife left to keep the ledger when the goldfield took her husband’s name
Everyone remembers the men who struck it rich on the Victorian goldfields. Almost nobody remembers who fed them, kept their books, buried their children, or waited at home while the letters slowed and then stopped.
Drawing on parish registers, assay-office ledgers and family correspondence, Priya Raman follows the wife left holding her husband’s failing claim through a single wet season on the diggings, as she learns to read a balance sheet, a rumour and a stranger’s intentions in roughly equal measure.
The result is a quiet, closely researched novel about the ledgers people keep when the official record keeps none — and about what a household owes the people it depends on.
Library and classroom sets available on request. Retailer links are inert in this demo.
PublisherDetails on requestFormatHardback, ebook, audioISBNAssigned at publicationNarratorDetails on request
“A ledger read like a novel, and a novel that trusts you to do the arithmetic.”
The Aldermoor Review
Books desk (fictional)
“Raman writes the goldfields the way good historians write the margins — carefully, and without inventing what she cannot prove.”
Kestrel FM Arts
Books desk (fictional)
“I have read a great deal about the diggings. I had not read this much about the tents behind them.”
The Quill & Lamp Weekly
Books desk (fictional)
One · The first entry in her own hand
Chapter one, complete. Roughly nine minutes.
The ledger had been her husband’s, and for the first eleven pages it stayed in his hand: fair, upright, unhurried, the columns squared off at the end of every week as if the goldfield owed him that much order in return.
The twelfth page was hers. She had not meant to write in it — she had meant only to check a figure — but the pen was already wet and the question would not wait for him to come back and answer it himself. So she wrote the question down, and then the answer she suspected, and then, because there was room, the sum she would need to survive the winter whether he came back or not.
Nobody had taught her to keep books. She had watched him do it for two years, the way a person watches rain, without expecting to need the knowledge. She would need it by morning.
Excerpt fictional