The spark that started Kline on the path to “The Exiles” ignited from a New York Times article on convict women shipped to Australia. I think gin is more of the convict’s drink.” Setting sail “There will definitely be wine,” Kline says, laughing. Of course, we wondered: will there be wine?

And her sons will sing an Australian sea shanty. A video on Kline’s research into the history behind her fiction is featured. Her composer son Hayden Kline scored a book trailer. Writer and book critic John Searles will serve as emcee, with Kline bopping from conversation to conversation with authors Elin Hilderbrand, Chris Bohjalian, Kristin Hannah and Paula McClain. “Their families were roaming around in the background and they were just having the best time, gossiping about chefs and talking about food and regaling people with stories.” “The two of them are old friends and had a glass of wine, both sitting in their kitchens, one in California, one in New York,” Kline says. One, a conversation between writer-chef Ruth Reichl and author Bill Buford, became the template for her own virtual programs. In a pandemic-scarred Old West, ‘Outlawed’ finds women in peril and fighting backīy the time “The Exiles” arrived, Kline had time to see which kinds of virtual events worked or didn’t.How Ruta Sepetys left LA and rock ‘n’ roll to achieve her dream to write historical novels.

In 1949, toddler Kathy Fiscus fell down a San Marino well, launching the age of live TV news.

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“It was such an interesting and difficult time to have a book come out,” Kline says of the way in which the pandemic forced authors out of their usual book tour routines. It’s a journey into the unknown for Evangeline and the other women she meets onboard a slave ship-turned-convict transport in Christina Baker Kline’s most recent novel.Īnd in its own way, the book itself traveled stormy seas to an uncertain destination given its arrival in August 2020 in a literary world turned upside down by pandemic and lockdown. In “The Exiles,” a young governess named Evangeline is wrongly convicted of stealing a ruby ring and sentenced to be shipped from Victorian England to Australia for 14 years of labor.

Orphan train by christina kline