AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
OPTIONED FOR TELEVISION BY BRUNA PAPANDREA, THE PRODUCER OF HBO'S BIG
LITTLE LIES
"A tour de force of original thought, imagination and promise ...
Kline takes full advantage of fiction -- its freedom to create
compelling characters who fully illuminate monumental events to make
history accessible and forever etched in our minds." -- Houston
Chronicle
The author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Orphan Train
returns with an ambitious, emotionally resonant novel about three women
whose lives are bound together in nineteenth-century Australia and the
hardships they weather together as they fight for redemption and freedom
in a new society.
Seduced by her employer's son, Evangeline, a naïve young governess in
early nineteenth-century London, is discharged when her pregnancy is
discovered and sent to the notorious Newgate Prison. After months in the
fetid, overcrowded jail, she learns she is sentenced 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 land.
During the journey on a repurposed 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 50,000
years, the British government in the 1840s considers its fledgling
colony uninhabited and unsettled, and views the natives 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 adopted by the new governor of Van
Diemen's Land.
In this gorgeous novel, Christina Baker Kline brilliantly recreates the
beginnings of a new society in a beautiful and challenging land, telling
the story of Australia from a fresh perspective, through the experiences
of Evangeline, Hazel, and Mathinna. 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 friendships, and the
unfettering of legacy.
