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New Zealand author Summary: A love story set amid real figures from 19th-century New Zealand theatre, revealing the life of actors and circus performers, as well as gold miners and colonial settlers. Lily Alouette tells her own story as a series of dramatic scenes. The daughter of French street performers, she was singing and dancing from an early age. But she was left an orphan in a strange country after emigrating with her parents to the goldfields of Australia, where mother and father died quickly and tragically. Performing in a circus offered Lily a chance of survival. Later she took to the stage in both Australia and New Zealand, which is where her unconventional love story begins. She is loved and pursued by two men: the faithful Jack Lacey and the renowned pirate, Bully Hayes