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. By the time the Medea arrives, many of them have been forcibly relocated, their land seized by white colonists. 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. 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.

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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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.

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