The Banolians is a family history that speaks to today’s reader, taking them on a journey from 1820 and the upper reaches of European nobility, through poverty, grief and separation from Estonia, England & Ireland to Australia, The story then returns to England in the ‘Edwardian Summer’ before World War 1, including tennis at Wimbledon, student life at Cambridge, and on to the trenches of Europe, while family members wait anxiously in Melbourne.
Starting with the love affair between the Estonian Baroness Amalie Christine and her doctor, Ferdinand Jencken – and their elopement - the story is built from personal diaries, letters and memoirs. They describe not only the perils and set backs, but also astonishing changes of fortunes, including their rescue by a complete stranger, who becomes the family’s benefactor.
Spanning three generations, readers have a ring-side seat to the spiritualism movement of the nineteenth century, the hardships of life in colonial Sydney, the world of ‘Marvellous Melbourne’ and its attendant economic crash, the perils of sea travel and the many small, personal distresses that family life brings. The Banolians is frequently stranger than fiction, as life so often is.
