The exiles : a novel
(Pre-loaded Audio)

Issued on Playaway, a dedicated audio media player.

One set of earphones and one AAA battery required for listening.

Read by Caroline Lee.

"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 '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 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 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 recreates 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"--,Provided by publisher.

PLAYAWAY