7.00 pm – 8.30 pm
Marion will be speaking with Lisa Conway (a member of our Salisbury group) and author of “A Strand of Gold”, a historical novel set in early 19th-century Singapore.
“A Strand of Gold” highlights the struggles faced by two Chinese women, in search of a better life. The narrative explores attitudes to slavery, prostitution and opium addiction against a backdrop of East India Company bureaucracy and Raffles’ idealism. Raffles and his adopted son, Dick, are major point of view characters in the novel alongside Chin Ming and Wing Yee. The intermingling of imagined female characters with real historical people gives the reader a fresh perspective on the last months that Raffles spent in Singapore, before he returned to England for the last time.