Excerpt from The Exiles by Christina Baker Kline, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

"This will be different. Timeo was ..." Lady Franklin shook her head. "The girl is an orphan, you said?" she asked, turning to Robinson.

"Yes. Her father was a chieftain. Her mother remarried, but recently died."

"Does that make her a princess?"

He smiled slightly. "Of a sort, perhaps."

"Hmm. What do you think, Sir John?"

Sir John smiled beneficently. "If you wish to amuse yourself in such a fashion, my dear, I suppose there's no harm in it."

"I think it will be entertaining."

"And if it isn't, we can always send her back."

Mathinna did not want to leave the island with these foolish people. She did not want to say goodbye to her stepfather and the other elders. She did not want to go to a strange new place where nobody knew or cared about her. Tugging on Robinson's hand, she whispered, "Please, sir. I don't—"

Slipping his hand from her grasp, he turned to the Franklins. "We will make the necessary arrangements."

"Very well." Lady Franklin cocked her head, appraising her. "Mathinna. I'd prefer to call her that. It will be more of a surprise if she achieves the manners of a lady."

Later, when the governor's party was distracted, Mathinna slipped behind the brick houses where everyone was gathered, still wearing the ceremonial wallaby-skin cape her father gave her before he died and a necklace of tiny green shells made by her mother. Wending her way through wallaby grass, silky against her shins, she listened to the barking dogs and the currawongs, plump black birds that warbled and flapped their wings when rain was on the way. She breathed in the familiar scent of eucalyptus. As she slid into the bush at the edge of the clearing, she looked up to see a geyser of muttonbirds erupt into the sky.

Excerpted from The Exiles by Christina Baker Kline. Copyright © 2020 by Christina Baker Kline. Excerpted by permission of Custom House. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.