Time of trial

Recounts the fortunes of two youths and a girl convicted of minor crimes by the nineteenth-century English courts and sent to the island penal colony of Tasmania. The setting is 1801, in a small dark bookshop on Holly Lane, in the shadow of St Paul's Cathedral. It is the home of Margaret Pargeter and smells of old leather bindings, parchment and ink. Her father's books and his bookselling are her life - or so they were until one day disaster strikes Holly Lane. A tide of anger against social conditions is unleashed, which means trouble for the Pargeter family.