Features

End-of-the-Year Contest 2020

Congratulations to the winners of our 2020 End-of-the-Year Contest! One Grand Prize winner received all 42 of Carol Fitzgerald's Bookreporter.com Bets On picks from 2020, while 14 others won a selection of three of these titles. You can see all the winners below, along with 2020's Bets On books.

Read more »

Christina Baker Kline, author of The Exiles

Seduced by her employer’s son, Evangeline, a naïve young governess in early 19th-century London, is discharged when her pregnancy is discovered and sent to the notorious Newgate Prison. Months later, she is sentenced to Van Diemen’s Land, a penal colony in Australia. During the journey on a repurposed slave ship, the Medea, Evangeline strikes up a friendship with Hazel, who was sentenced to seven years transport for stealing a silver spoon. Though Australia has been home to Aboriginal people for more than 50,000 years, the British government considers its fledgling colony uninhabited and unsettled. By the time the Medea arrives, many of them have been forcibly relocated, including Mathinna, who has been adopted by the new governor of Van Diemen’s Land.

Read more »

The Exiles by Christina Baker Kline

September 2020

I confess to knowing nothing about the penal colonies in Australia before reading THE EXILES. In it, Christina Baker Kline takes us to Australia in the mid-1800s when the country was being populated with convicts from the UK, who were sent there by ship, in droves. She tells the story through the eyes of three young women: one from England, one from Wales and one from Tasmania. She gives us such a strong sense of the country, which was so primitive.

Read more »

Week of July 5, 2021

Paperback releases for the week of July 5th include MIGRATIONS, Charlotte McConaghy's ode to a disappearing world and a breathtaking page-turner about the possibility of hope against all odds; ANXIOUS PEOPLE by Fredrik Backman, a charming, poignant novel about a crime that never took place, a would-be bank robber who disappears into thin air, and eight extremely anxious strangers who find that they have more in common than they ever imagined; Christina Baker Kline's THE EXILES, an ambitious, emotionally resonant work of historical fiction that captures the hardship, oppression, opportunity and hope of a trio of women’s lives --- two English convicts and an orphaned Aboriginal girl --- in 19th-century Australia; and YALE NEEDS WOMEN, Anne Gardiner Perkins' unflinching account of how a group of young women fought against the backward-leaning traditions of a centuries-old institution and created the opportunities that would carry them into the future.

Read more »