A number one bestseller, this favourite New Zealand novel captures a real 19th century community.

This classic has been released in the Popular Penguin format to mark 50 years of publishing in New Zealand. The format reaches further back to 1935, when Allen Lane founded Penguin Books with a clear vision- 'We believed in the existence of a vast reading public for intelligent books at a low price, and staked everything on it.'

Into the bleak coal-mining settlement isolated high on a plateau above the West Coast come five-year-old Rose and her mother. No one knows what has driven them there, but most agree the mother must be desperate to choose Denniston; worse, to choose that drunkard Jimmy Cork as bedfellow. This number one bestseller is a compelling novel about isolation and survival.