Coulter Valley

About the Book

When Tom decides to write the history of his artistic family, he finds himself embroiled in the strange situation at Coulter Valley, the family's old home, where elderly aunts Sophie and Bernice still live.

Artists Tom and Edith, young Tom's great-grandparents, raised their four children as 'a family dedicated to art', isolated from the adverse influences of the outside world, and young Tom's research gradually uncovers the results of this dedicated, rigid attitude.

Will his investigations end in tragedy? Or will family soidarity triumph?

About the Author

BARBARA YATES ROTHWELL lived, married and brought up six children in Surrey, England, before emigrating to Western Australia in 1974 with her musician husband and their two youngest daughters. Her other children arrived in Australia in due course.

Also a musician and a trained singer, she was for ten years in the 1980s a music reviewer for The West Australian newspaper.

After founding and running the Yanchep Community School for eight years, and having successfully written and sold innumerable short stories and articles to major magazines in several countries, Barbara decided it was time to branch out into novel writing. Longman Cheshire published her teenage historical novel, THE BOY FROM THE HULKS, in 1994, and in 1998 her historical novel DUTCH POINT was published privately in England.

In 2004 she joined forces with Trafford Publishing (Canada) to produce COULTER VALLEY, an Australian story tracing the effects on a family of artists of a despotic father; and in 2005 the same cooperation produced KLARA, fiction based on fact, the story of a German Jewess who, forced to leave Nazi Germany, was sponsored by an English family.

Barbara was a journalist in the UK for several years, as Women's Page Editor for a large group of weekly papers in the south of England, and as a free-lance. She has also written two full-length and several one-act plays, which have been performed in community theatres in Western Australia and New South Wales.

Dutch Point, Barbara Yates Rothwell's historical novel, largely based in Western Australia, was published in 1998 under her own imprint, The Lagoon Press. It is still available in hardback from The Lagoon Press: e-mail -morgand_hbyr@iinet.net.au Price: AUS$35.00 plus p&p. Schools and libraries can purchase it at a special low price, plus p&p.