Meanwhile in Borneo, Ross’s brother Edmund, a naturalist, is laid low with a severe attack of malaria while collecting specimens. The female characters are admirable- I love Clorinda’s work ethic and desire to overcome the poverty and famine of her native Ireland, I love Jane’s independence and unconventionality which is at total odds with the times, something she perhaps inherits from her artist Aunt Emmeline. But nowadays a historical novel in which “lost tribes” remain lost runs the risk of appearing out of step.

The women seem stronger than the men, capable of rolling with life’s punches, while the men seem rather ineffectual. During an encounter with Savage, Leon is torn between an obstinate wish “to say that he was tired of being subservient to the rajah” and the stirrings of “a feeling he refused to name as love”. Tremain never ever quite places it like this, but in Ross she dramatizes the pathology determined in Virginia Woolf’s book-length essay Three Guineas: that of the man who expects as well as requires to see himself multiplied in females’s eyes. The characters here are vividly drawn and engender strong likes and dislikes - the main protagonist, Jane, is an unusual woman in Victorian England, being both exceptionally tall and attracted to women. Or maybe it is just that it makes me feel just as lost as the characters which is rather unTremainesque?Beautiful narration and the need to find out how they will develop made this story unputdownable for me.

Here Jane embarks on a journey of self-discovery with Julietta, the beautiful wife of one of Emmeline’s friends, and tries to imagine a life that could accommodate this newfound passion. It won the National Jewish Book Award in the US, the South Bank Sky Arts Award in the UK and was shortlisted for the Costa Novel Award. At a certain point while reading, when I thought of all the female characters, and realised how strongly independent all of them were, and looked at the relationships they had to the men around them, I wondered if this novel was actually satire. Compromised by his transgressive passions, and the invasive power of the rainforest which continually thwarts his schemes, Savage must fight to survive.As far as I'm concerned, it was much more interesting to delve into the lives of the protagonists in Bath, London and Ireland, and those were in fact the sections of the novel I most enjoyed. Taking us from the genteel tea rooms of Bath to the jungles of Borneo via the slums of Dublin and glorious Paris. It highlights some of the issues of that era, but does so with a cast of characters that are not stereotypical, which makes it all the more interesting to read, because it defies expectation and presents an alternate scenario by focusing on those who defy convention, transgressing this straight-laced, Victorian society daring to live in ways outside mainstream society and getting away with it.