The Exiles by Christina Baker Kline
The Exiles by Christina Baker Kline
Seduced by her employer's son, naive London governess Evangeline is arrested on a trumped-up charge when her pregnancy is discovered and is sent to the notorious Newgate Prison. After months in the fetid, overcrowded jail, she learns she will be exiled to "the land beyond the seas," Van Diemen's Land, a penal colony in Australia. Though uncertain of what awaits, Evangeline knows one thing: the child she carries will be born on the months-long voyage to this distant place.
During the journey on a re-purposed slave ship, the Medea, Evangeline strikes up a friendship with Hazel, a girl little older than her former pupils, who was sentenced to seven years' transport for stealing a silver spoon. Canny where Evangeline is guileless, Hazel -- a skilled midwife and herbalist -- is soon offering home remedies to both prisoners and sailors in return for a variety of favors.
Though Australia has been home to Aboriginal people for more than fifty thousand years, the British government in the 1840s considers its fledgling colony uninhabited and untamed and views the indigenous people as an unpleasant nuisance. By the time the Medea arrives, many of them have been forcibly relocated, their land seized by white colonists. One of these relocated people is Mathinna, the orphaned daughter of the chief of the Lowreenne tribe, who has been taken in on a whim by the new governor of Van Diemen's Land.
In this gorgeous novel based on true events, Christina Baker Kline brilliantly re-creates the beginnings of a new society in a beautiful and challenging land. While life in Australia is punishing and often brutally unfair, it is also, for some, an opportunity: for redemption, for a new way of life, for unimagined freedom. Told in exquisite detail and incisive prose, The Exiles is a story of grace born from hardship, the unbreakable bonds of female friendship, and the unfettering of legacy.
WILLIAM MORROW & COMPANY, HARDCOVER, 1ST EDITION, 2ND PRINTING, 2020.
THIS IS A BRAND NEW BOOK.