Entangled
TJ Carter
Type: Beta project
Genre: Historical fiction, romance, literary
Word count: 103,650
One mistake cost Jem Edwards everything. Torn from the quiet fields of 1820s Derbyshire and cast into the merciless machinery of the British convict system, he is sent to the far edge of the world — a land as unforgiving as the sentence that delivered him there. Yet in this untamed place, even a brutalised life can rise again.
One mistake cost Jem Edwards everything. Torn from the quiet fields of 1820s Derbyshire and cast into the merciless machinery of the British convict system — a world built to extract labour, crush defiance, and strip men of their worth — he is shackled to strangers and sent to a distant colony. Jem must face that his future now rests on the consequences of his own judgement.
The burgeoning colony offers little comfort: brutality, hardship, and the constant press to survive shape each day. Jem endures by clinging to the one place no chain can reach — his mind — and the quiet promise inked into his skin: Courage. Freedom. Resilience.
But the wild southern land has its own laws, dangers, and entanglements. And as Jem is drawn into a life he never sought, he discovers what he is truly made of — what the heart will risk when everything else has been taken.
TJ Carter is an Australian historical novelist whose work explores the human stories behind early colonial life. Earlier studies in Psychology and Archaeology were eventually overtaken by an abiding interest in family history, supported by years of genealogical research into her own family’s past, DNA breakthroughs, and a childhood spent in Dawes Point — the same ground her convict ancestors once crossed. Though she later moved away, she continues to make her home in New South Wales.
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