A foray into historical faction starting with a real-life English emigrant, Napoleon Gilbert, ancestor of Ms Gilbert, born in 1799 who immigrated with his family to Tasmania in the late 1820?s.This family saga spans five generations, rags to riches and back again, farming and convict labour in Tasmania, butchering meat for Victorian goldminers, Darling Downs squattocracy, Ballarat and Melbourne Architect, genteel Melbourne society, the 1890 crash, Prussian farmers in Ipswich, the First World War, death and poverty in Port Pirie and scandalous unwed motherhood in Adelaide. The connecting thread is the fact that all the Gilbert sons had Napoleon as their middle name, ending the author?s father, Melbourne Napoleon Gilbert. It is an entertaining and novel way of writing history, proving that fact is stranger than fiction. ***