Name: A Great Act of Love
Author: Heather Rose

Heather Rose’ A Great Act of Love is thoughtful literary historical fiction exploring how the best and worst of human nature shaped history. Read my review.

A Great Act of Love by Heather Rose Book Review Heather Rose' A Great Act of Love: Highly literary history

Publication: HarperCollins December 2025

Genre: Historical, Drama, Mystery, Adventure

A Great Act of Love Publisher Synopsis

From the award-winning author of The Museum of Modern Love and Bruny comes an enthralling tale of legacy, love and the making of champagne.

Van Diemen’s Land, 1839. A young woman of means arrives in Hobart, with a young boy in her care. Leasing an old cottage next to an abandoned vineyard, Caroline Douglas must navigate an insular colony of exiles and opportunists to create a new life on this island of extreme seasons and wild beauty. But Caroline is carrying a secret of such magnitude it has led her to cross the world, and it will take all she is made of to bring it into the light.

Soaring from the champagne vineyards of revolutionary France to London and early colonial Australia, A Great Act of Love is a spellbinding novel of legacy, passion and reinvention. At its heart is a family with champagne in their blood and a fearless daughter determined to rewrite fate.

Inspired by true events, A Great Act of Love is an immensely beautiful and heartrending saga of a father and daughter, and the enduring power of familial love.

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My Review

As a huge fan of Heather Rose’s previous fiction, I was excited to get my hands on a copy of A Great Act of Love.

This novel started strong, with the initial focus Caroline’s highly enigmatic and compelling narrative. Rose’s judicious revelations are sufficient to endear us to resourceful Caroline’s plight, while leaving ample unconnected puzzle pieces to maintain intrigue and suspense.

Rose then gradually introduces more character narratives and time perspectives, to broaden the audience’s view of Caroline’s family history and all that led to her starting afresh in Van Diemen’s Land.

Caroline will tell the story of how she came to Tasmania, when it was still called Van Diemen’s Land, many times. She will cast her inventions into the future. Those who carry them on will call it history, but she will call it her life.

There are numerous secondary characters in A Great Act of Love — some well-developed, and others less so. But pleasingly, among them are ample resourceful women and open-minded men who value their strength and intellect, at least privately, at a time when this was not the norm.

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In thoughtful, nuanced storytelling, Rose evokes the weightiness of history and the sliding door moments that can so easily change an individual’s trajectory, while highlighting the immense grey on the scale of right and wrong. These elements, along with their counterweights Caroline’s story highlights, individual agency and resilience through patience and industry, definitely struck a chord with me.

However, as the focus moved away from Caroline and splintered to the secondary cast in A Great Act of Love’s latter half, highly literary and philosophical tangents began to weigh down the narrative. That stymied the pacing, and my emotional engagement waned. Some of the epic coincidences that facilitated Caroline’s story coming full circle, for me, lacked the same gravitas as this novel’s expansive opening and ambition. But I acknowledge the challenge Rose faced in her quest to meld numerous disparate factual historical threads into this fictional plot.

A Great Act of Love is in parts deeply moving historical fiction, featuring immeasurable loss and trauma, with the strongest emotions reserved for familial love rather than the romantic. However, I’d recommend this novel only to readers with strong literary leanings, for consumption only when in the most contemplative of moods.