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.

Enjoy this new romantic historical fantasy series from RITA® Award nominated author M.J. Scott. To save her new life, she needs the man who destroyed her old one... Chloe de Montesse never thought she’d return from exile. Now she has a chance to reclaim the life she fled after her husband was executed for treason. But coming home again isn’t as simple as it sounds. Her magic is rusty, her family want her to wrap her in cotton wool, and Illvyan society views her as a scandal waiting to happen. Worse, fate keeps throwing her into the path of the man who ruined her life. Lucien de Roche’s magic bares the truth for all to see. He’s used it to serve the empire, but there’s one secret he’s always kept hidden. The fact that he fell in love with his best friend’s wife. And that he’s never quite fallen out again. Now Chloe is back and it’s no secret at all that she loathes him for his part in her husband’s death. A sensible man would forget her…but he’s tired of being sensible. And determined to keep her safe. When a mission from the emperor takes them both into the wildest heart of the empire, to a country where power and loyalties collide, and old plots simmer back to life, Chloe finds herself dragged back into the past she wants to leave behind. And her only way out might be Lucien. The man she thinks she can never trust. The man she wants to hate. Or hates to want… The Exile’s Curse is the first book in the Daughter of Ravens series, a new romantic gaslamp fantasy series from RITA® Award nominated author M.J. Scott, set in the same world as the Four Arts series. This series has old friends turned enemies (and then enemies to lovers), a heroine looking for a second chance, a smitten hero, political intrigue, royal witches, inconvenient marriages, sexy times and more. Enjoy! Author's note: For tropes and CW, please check the author's website.

Mavis Gallant is the modern master of what Henry James called the international story, the fine-grained evocation of the quandaries of people who must make their way in the world without any place to call their own. The irreducible complexity of the very idea of home is especially at issue in the stories Gallant has written about Montreal, where she was born, although she has lived in Paris for more than half a century. Varieties of Exile, Russell Banks's extensive new selection from Gallant's work, demonstrates anew the remarkable reach of this writer's singular art. Among its contents are three previously uncollected stories, as well as the celebrated semi-autobiographical sequence about Linnet Muir—stories that are wise, funny, and full of insight into the perils and promise of growing up and breaking loose.

"Originally published in Great Britain by Persephone Books"--Title page verso.

"Mommy, mommy, call him. Tell him to come here right away. I have so many things to tell him!" I had a ton of things to tell him. I wanted him to find a solution to all the shortages of clothes; of meat, so it would again be distributed through the ration books. I also wanted to ask him to give our Christmas back. And to come live with us. I wanted to let him know how much we really needed him... Fidel didn't answer my letter. I kept writing him letters from a sweet and well-behaved child, a brave but sad girl. Letters resembling those of a secret, spurned lover... As a girl growing up in Cuba, Alina Fernandez found nothing abnormal in the fact that Fidel Castro would occasionally visit her house bearing gifts just for her. At the age of ten, her mother finally told her the truth: she was Castro's Daughter.

On the dawn of Namibia's independence from South African rule in 1990, around 43,000 exiles were repatriated to the country formerly known as South West Africa. Of these, many had left their country of birth to flee the brutality of South Africa's apartheid regime, and/or to join the struggle (political and armed) for Namibia's liberation, waged primarily by the South West Africa People's Organization (SWAPO). But included in the 43,000, were about 20,000 children who had never set foot in or fully experienced the country to which they were being repatriated, having been born to and/or raised by exiled soldiers and refugees of the struggle. In Namibia, these children are often referred to simply as 'exile kids', though the country's Government officially recognizes them as "The Children of the Liberation Struggle." Rachel Valentina Nghiwete, is one such 'exile kid', born in the SWAPO camps of Kwanza-Sul, Angola, in 1979, to Namibian soldiers fighting under SWAPO's banner. Set against the background of Namibia's liberation struggle, Valentina: The Exile Child details the author's experience growing up in exile, her 'repatriation' to Namibia in 1989 on the eve of the country's independence, and her life outside the country in London and Washington DC, as the daughter of an Ambassador, as a businesswoman, and as an individual in pursuit of financial freedom. The Exile Child also explores the challenges of establishing a Namibian identity after an early life in exile, and looks at how children of the liberation struggle - at home in Namibia and abroad - have struggled to adjust. Read this book for a historical account of Namibia's road to freedom from the perspective of an exile kid, and for an inspiring tale of a Namibian exile child's painful and joyful journey to finding and living a life of meaning and purpose.