Rosetta. Alexandra Joel. 2016.

Headstrong and beautiful, in 1905 Rosetta escaped her safe Melbourne life, deserting her respectable husband and five-year-old daughter to run away with Zeno the Magnificent, a half-Chinese fortune teller and seducer of souls. 

The pair reinvented themselves in London, where they beguiled European society and risked everything for a life of glamour and desire. Rosetta said she was American; Zeno claimed to be a brilliant Japanese professor. Together they attracted the patronage of famous writers, inventors and scientists, lords and ladies, dukes and duchesses.

Rosetta revelled in a life few women of her time would have dared to embrace, yet all the while she hid her secret shame: the daughter she had left behind.

This is the compelling story of Alexandra Joel’s quest to uncover the truth about her scandalous great-grandmother, and the shocking century-old secret she would discover at the heart of her family.