Book Description

What happens when you're cast out from everything you love and know?From the moment London midwife Maggie Bloodworth steals a handful of clothes she's in a fight for survival and her very soul.Banished in 1790 to a world where right and wrong have no meaning, she must live by her own rules amidst deprivation and cruelty, and strive for a way to return to her abandoned daughter. All the while, she's haunted by her mother's dying vision that she's marked in some way.From England to Sydney Cove, far-flung Norfolk Island, and the wilds of Van Diemen's Land, she must reckon with how to be a good person in a bad world, even as she becomes an adulterer, bigamist, and interloper in a land that's not hers.But the greatest test is yet to come, in a letter she's not meant to see, exposing the lie at the heart of all she's wrested from hardship, and the betrayal of the man she's learned to trust.A profound story, based on a real character and events, it lays bare the hidden truth of what one woman, and many others, sacrificed for the shaping of a nation.This Savage World is Anna Housego's fourth novel. She is also the author of Crows On The Roof, One Small Life, and The Way To Midnight.