A girl of Irish parentage, growing up in the Dutch East Indies in the 17th century, meets romance and heartbreak on a clove plantation. Julia Ashley was born to a life of dramatic twists and tragedy. Saved from Cromwell’s Irish massacres by her nurse, saved from starvation by a Dutch sea captain… Her future and any possible lasting happiness depended entirely on a ‘glove marriage’ to a man who was no more than a name.

The Dutch East Indies, in the seventeenth century, were lands of legendary riches; of ‘nutmeg princes;’ of fortunes and family empires built on barbaric plantations and slavery. And amid the extravagance, the cruelty, the bizarre customs, perhaps the strangest events of all were the curious weddings that
sent girls half-way around the world to husbands they had never seen.

Julia, brave and stoical with a stormy and turbulent history behind her, took her ‘glove’—of yellow, pearl-sewn silk—and began the journey to the island of Rua, to a land of seeming paradise where nothing was exactly as it appeared.

Scent of Cloves
by Norah Lofts
3.82 · Rating details · 184 Ratings · 12 Reviews
This novel is set in Indonesia in the seventeenth century, and it is characterised by the author's remarkable power to convey place and period. The heroine, Julie Ashley loses her family and her identity when Cromwell ravages Ireland and she is rescued from starvation by a Dutch sea captain. From Amsterdam she is eventually sent to an island in the East Indies as a partner in a 'Glove Marriage', bound irrevocably to a man she has never seen. In the mysterious island of Rua, with its luxury and cruelty, even her virtues are brought into conflict, and for the reader, the outcome remains uncertain until the end.