The year is 1890. Enzam's existence has been lonely and unfulfilling, so when her ship is overtaken by pirates in the East Indies, it seems the last sorry chapter in her life.
Dijenkau, a Makassar shipmaster, has experienced his own lifetime of lovelessness. Born to a British father and an Aboriginal mother, he learned early on to make his own way, as he didn't feel he belonged anywhere.
When Enzam and Dijenkau are abandoned at sea by the pirates, the two strangers are bound together by some unspoken vow.
Soon, Enzam finds herself on an unexpected journey with the strange shipmaster, searching for an ancient aphrodisiac recipe that was lost fifty years earlier in the heart of the Australian desert. Yet, as the explorers travel deeper into Australia's last bloody frontier, they begin to realize that they too are being hunted. Struggling to trust, much less survive, Enzam cannot bring herself to admit that she knows who pursues them.
A thrilling historical novel, Enzam and the Just Prince is also an intelligent literary story that poses deep questions about morality, social expectations, and our treatment of the most vulnerable among us.
About the Author: Erica Bell was born on the islands of New Guinea and grew up in the Bismarck Archipelago's New Britain and the Louisiade Archipelago's Misima. Her teenage years were filled with outback camping adventures in Australia's Northern Territory, and as an adult she lived in Queensland before migrating to America, where she wrote her first book, Hilda and the Ship's Doctor, a historical fiction novel.
Bell now lives in Tasmania, where she works as an academic. Inspired by her own experiences rambling over the Northern Territory terrain as a teenager, as well as by the history of the trepang fishermen from South Sulawesi who, hundreds of years ago, mastered extraordinary feats of navigation in the area, Bell has written her second historical novel, Enzam and the Just Prince. It is a thrilling nineteenth-century adventure following the unlikely pairing of a Dutch woman and a Makassar shipmaster in search of an ancient recipe.
