Siân Rees

Relates the story of the eighteenth-century prison ship, the Lady Julian, full of women bound for Australia, detailing their journey to the penal colony to serve as mates for the hordes of men already here.

The Extraordinary True Story of an Eighteenth-century Ship and Its Cargo of Female Convicts

The Floating Brothel

Brilliant, intensely political, and inseparable for nearly 70 years, Lucie Aubrac and her husband, Raymond, are legendary figures of the French Resistance. Founding leaders of Libération-Sud, one of the most important resistance movements in France, they ran the underground newspaper Libération and served as couriers, arms carriers, and saboteurs. In 1943, when the Gestapo imprisoned Raymond, Lucie engineered a daring escape plan that brought her face to face with feared Gestapo chief Klaus Barbie. When Raymond was arrested again, Lucie mounted a second astonishing rescue, ambushing the prison van that was transporting him. For the post-war generation, the Aubracs were heroes. However, in 1983, Klaus Barbie made the bombshell claim that the Aubracs had become informers in 1943, betraying their comrades. Although later discredited, the allegations raised questions around the many embellishments and inconsistencies in the tales Lucie weaved around herself. Who was Lucie Aubrac? What did she really do in 1943? Siân Rees's penetrating account—the first English-language biography of this extraordinary woman—provides a long-needed corrective to Lucie Aubrac's own admittedly "impressionistic" memoir and a fascinating exploration of the intersection of history, legend, and mythologizing.

The French Resistance Heroine Who Outwitted the Gestapo

Lucie Aubrac

Sweet Water and Bitter is the extraordinary sequel to Britain's abolition of the slave trade in 1807. The last legal British slave ship left Africa that year, but other countries and illegal slavers continued to trade. When the Napoleonic Wars ended in 1815, British diplomats negotiated anti-slave-trade treaties and a 'Preventive Squadron' was formed to cruise the West African coast. In six decades, this small fleet liberated 150,000 Africans and lost 17,000 of its own men doing so. This is the tale of their exciting and arduous campaign. It is a story of unforeseen consequences and a swashbuckling naval adventure, full of sensational, first-hand accounts of life at sea; of the grim 'barracoons', the slave-brokers' luxurious compounds and the lonely garrisons dotting the coast. Combining flawless research with an intimate and dramatic narrative, this is a voyage that no one will forget.

The Ships that Stopped the Slave Trade

Sweet Water and Bitter

Daniel Defoe's fictional heroine Moll Flanders is famous for her criminal and sexual adventures, racily portrayed n big and small screen romps as bawdy wench, fallen woman and proto-feminist trailblazer. But who was she? And what world did she really inhabit? To answer these questions Sian Rees takes her readers on a journey of literary and historical detection, across continents, cultures and centuries. Following Moll's tumultuous life, the story moves from Jacobean England to Jamestown, Virginia; from the English Civil War to the struggles of the Powhatan Indians; and from the metropolis of London to the hamlet of Annapolis in the early eighteenth century. Introducing us to a rogues' gallery of real-life versions of Moll, it is as fast-moving and rich in incident as Defoe's great novel.

Siân Rees

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