A memoire of Old Shanghai

Published 2022

Shanghai-born Maureen de la Harpe was eight months old when the city was attacked by Japanese forces and two thousand people lost their lives. At the age of seven, her family and close relatives were interned in a Japanese concentration camp until the end of WW2. The family left China a year later.

It was not until 2014 that the author returned to Shanghai, with her daughter Lara, to rediscover the city of her birth, and it was that visit that prompted them to begin tracking the lives of their forebears. The author discovered she was a fourth generation ‘Shanghailander’, whose family history spanned the period of foreign settlement in the city.

Through the lives of her ancestors and her own childhood experiences during the war, the author has woven the story of foreign settlement in the cosmopolitan city of Shanghai.

A novel set in Southern Africa

Published 2000

The year is 1891, when two English nurses, Clarissa and Emma, trek from the Portuguese East African Coast, through plains teeming with wildlife, to the wild, beautiful heart of Southern Africa. Their aim - to set up a hospital in the fledgling colony, Rhodesia.  

More than half a century later, Clarissa’s granddaughter Liz Pendennis arrives in the young colony, where the winds of change are stirring the sparks of black nationalism. Retracing her grandmother’s footsteps, she is caught up in a new drama - a controversial dam project that will displace more than 50,000 tribespeople.

From the malaria swamps of the Indian Ocean coast to the banks of the wild Zambezi River, exploration and adventure, romance and superstition, are woven into a tale of two women snared by the spell of Africa.

Tales of life on a farm in Southern Africa

First published in 1992

A biographical journey of the author’s life as a young wife on a tobacco farm in northern Rhodesia in the 1960s.