Viviane de Faitaud has grown up alone at the Chateau de Belisama-sur-le-Lac in Brittany, for her father, the Marquis de Ravoisier, lives at the court of Louis XVI in Versailles. After a hailstorm destroys the chateau’s orchards, gardens and fields an ambitious young Welshman, David Stronach, accepts the commission to plan the chateau’s new gardens in the hope of making his name as a landscape designer.
David and Viviane fall in love, but it is an impossible romance and they are soon driven apart. As their lives take different journeys, it is the story of ‘The Blue Rose’, a Chinese fable of impossible love, that propels David back to find Viviane.
Join Kate Forsyth in conversation with cultural producer, writer and editor Aimée Lindorff as she discusses her new book The Blue Rose, a story that moves between Imperial China and France during the ‘terror’ of the French Revolution and inspired by the true story of the quest for a blood-red rose.
Books will be available for purchase at the event, or bring your copy from home for Kate to sign.
Presented as part of the Lord Mayor's Writers in Residence series.
