The cartographer's secret

Evie Ludgrove inherited her father's desire to figure out what happened to disappeared explorer Dr. Ludwig Leichhardt. Evie, a great artist and mapmaker already, is delighted when her father asks her to work with him on a book about Leichhardt. Evie's passion for this project prompts her to take a trip--one from which she never returns. Thirty years later, Evie's niece Letitia Rawlings is trying to cope with the sudden loss of her older brother, Thorne. Traveling to the family property at Yellow Rock to tell her great-aunt Olivia about Thorne's death, city girl Letitia is surprised to see how much she likes this more rural part of Australia. Soon Letitia is as obsessed with finding out what happened to Evie as Evie was with Leichhardt. Shifting perspectives from Evie in 1880 to Letitia in 1911, Cooper paints a fascinating portrait of two women rebelling in their own ways against the expectations society and their family have for them. Historical-fiction fans will delight in this romantic tale of family and long-held secrets.

A young woman investigates her family's role in a decades-old mystery in Australian writer Cooper's moving latest (after The Girl in the Painting). In 1911, 25-year-old Lettie Rawlings's older brother, Thorne, dies in a boating accident. Lettie's mother, Miriam, sends her from Sydney to the family's horse-breeding estate to tell her great-aunt Olivia that she is now the estate's rightful heir, which Olivia disputes. Though despondent over Thorne's death, Lettie gets swept up in uncovering both what happened to her aunt Evie Ludgrove, who went missing nearly 20 years ago, as well as the disappearance decades earlier of real-life explorer Ludwig Leichhardt, which had obsessed her late grandfather. Since Olivia and Miriam are estranged, Olivia is initially wary of Lettie's surprise visit, but they become close as Lettie's research uncovers Evie's possible fate, and Lettie makes no claim on the estate. An 1880 narrative follows Evie, a gifted artist and promising mapmaker, who shares her father's preoccupation with Leichhardt; when a large reward is offered for proof of where Leichhardt died, Evie is determined to claim the reward for the cash-strapped farm, but she vanishes while pursuing a lead. Cooper gets to the heart of a family's old wounds, puzzles, and obsessions, while providing a luscious historical rendering of the landscape. This layered family saga will keep readers turning the pages. (Nov.)