The Tea Rose: A Novel (The Tea Rose Series, 1)

The Tea Rose is a towering, old-fashioned story imbued with a modern sensibility—a sweeping epic of a family's destruction, murder and revenge, love lost and won again, and one determined woman's quest to survive and triumph. East London, 1888—a city apart. It is a place of shadow and light where thieves, dreamers, and working folk mingle, where children play in cobbled streets by day and a killer stalks at night. Here, by the whispering waters of the Thames, Fiona Finnegan, a worker in a tea factory, dares to dream of a life beyond tumbledown wharves and gaslit alleys. She hopes to open a shop of her own alongside her lifelong love, Joe Bristow, a costermonger's son. With nothing but faith in each other, Fiona and Joe struggle, save, and sacrifice to achieve their future. But Fiona's world is shattered when the actions of a dark and brutal man take nearly everything—and everyone—she holds dear. Fearing for her own life, she is forced to flee London for New York. There, her indomitable spirit propels her rise from a modest West Side shopfront to the top of Manhattan's tea trade. Yet her old ghosts do not rest quietly. To silence them, Fiona must return to the London of her youth, where a deadly confrontation with her past holds the key to her future. Authentic and deeply moving, Jennifer Donnelly's The Tea Rose is an unforgettable historical novel.