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Astraea
It's the early 19th century and a small sailing ship with a cargo of convict women and their children is crossing the ocean to a penal colony. Among those trying to survive is a 15-year-old girl. After caring for her only friend who has poisoned herself, she discovers a kind of liberation within the confines of the ship, as she moves into her unknowable, distant future.
Weatherglass Novella Prize Winner 2024
Ali Smith says: ' This powerful novella, historical and immediate, atmospheric, visceral, lyrical and frank, crosses the horizon between story, history and reality. Its passengers might be in the grip of some foul brutal institutional power but their life, their vitality and their survival form the beating heart of a unique read, the language of which forms a rough fabric so tangible you can feel it on your skin. The blood heat and the cool clean soul of this tale will stay with you long after you're back on dry land.'
Weatherglass Novella Prize Winner 2024
Ali Smith says: ' This powerful novella, historical and immediate, atmospheric, visceral, lyrical and frank, crosses the horizon between story, history and reality. Its passengers might be in the grip of some foul brutal institutional power but their life, their vitality and their survival form the beating heart of a unique read, the language of which forms a rough fabric so tangible you can feel it on your skin. The blood heat and the cool clean soul of this tale will stay with you long after you're back on dry land.'
128 pages, Paperback
Published August 22, 2024
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 34 reviews
August 16, 2024
Transported to Van Diemen's Land
Review of the Weatherglass Books paperback (expected release August 22, 2024).
Astraea tells a 19th century story of the voyage of the title ship bearing a boatload of female convicts to exile in Van Diemen's Land (the early colonial name for Tasmania). The women, many traveling along with their children or giving birth enroute, have been sentenced for petty crimes of theft. This was a forced method of creating a female population for the colonization of Australia at the time (there was no provision for their return to Europe). The women were assigned / sentenced to unpaid domestic or factory work, in effect the slavery of indentured servitude.
Opening page of "Astraea". Image sourced from Paul Fulcher's X(Twitter) here.
The story centres on one young woman, who is travelling without her newborn who has been left behind with the grandmother. Because of her lactating she becomes a nursemaid for others giving birth onboard. Her friendship with a rebellious young woman is part of the plot as they attempt to plan their future under the repressive conditions. Both act out in various ways which result in ship board punishments meted out, solitary confinements in either the coal hole or a wooden coffin-sized prison box.
Astraea was a harrowing and unforgettable reading experience about a hidden history that is perhaps little known. It easily became one of my 5-star "can't stop reading in order to find out what will happen" ratings.
Illustration of the cramped conditions onboard the female convict transportation ships. Image sourced from Pinterest.
This was the co-winner of the inaugural 2024 Weatherglass Novella Prize, along with Deborah Tomkins' Aerth (to be published January 2025) as selected by novelist Ali Smith.
I read Astraea through my subscription to independent publisher Weatherglass Books UK. Subscribers receive the books several weeks prior to the official publication date.
Other Reviews
As always, Paul Fulcher's review is highly recommended and you can read it here.
Soundtrack
Although written from a male convict's point of view, I immediately thought of the folk song Van Dieman's Land* as performed by the John Renbourn Group on the album Live in America (1982) which you can listen to on YouTube here or on Spotify here.
* Alternate spelling for Van Diemen's Land on the John Renbourn Group's Live in America album credits, possibly a typo.
Trivia and Links
You can read further on the subject of female convicts transported from England & Ireland to Australia at Wikipedia and at the Female Convicts Research Centre.
Aside from the assaults, deprivations and punishments suffered by the female convicts on board the Astraea ship in the novel, there is also the shocking use of blistering powder as a medical treatment by the onboard surgeon. In the early 19th century this was still thought of as a "cure" for certain ailments. The source of the blistering agent Cantharidin is the same beetle as for the poisonous s0-called "aphrodisiac" Spanish Fly. You can read further at Medical blistering in the Georgian Era.
Review of the Weatherglass Books paperback (expected release August 22, 2024).
Astraea tells a 19th century story of the voyage of the title ship bearing a boatload of female convicts to exile in Van Diemen's Land (the early colonial name for Tasmania). The women, many traveling along with their children or giving birth enroute, have been sentenced for petty crimes of theft. This was a forced method of creating a female population for the colonization of Australia at the time (there was no provision for their return to Europe). The women were assigned / sentenced to unpaid domestic or factory work, in effect the slavery of indentured servitude.
Opening page of "Astraea". Image sourced from Paul Fulcher's X(Twitter) here.
The story centres on one young woman, who is travelling without her newborn who has been left behind with the grandmother. Because of her lactating she becomes a nursemaid for others giving birth onboard. Her friendship with a rebellious young woman is part of the plot as they attempt to plan their future under the repressive conditions. Both act out in various ways which result in ship board punishments meted out, solitary confinements in either the coal hole or a wooden coffin-sized prison box.
Astraea was a harrowing and unforgettable reading experience about a hidden history that is perhaps little known. It easily became one of my 5-star "can't stop reading in order to find out what will happen" ratings.
Illustration of the cramped conditions onboard the female convict transportation ships. Image sourced from Pinterest.
This was the co-winner of the inaugural 2024 Weatherglass Novella Prize, along with Deborah Tomkins' Aerth (to be published January 2025) as selected by novelist Ali Smith.
I read Astraea through my subscription to independent publisher Weatherglass Books UK. Subscribers receive the books several weeks prior to the official publication date.
Other Reviews
As always, Paul Fulcher's review is highly recommended and you can read it here.
Soundtrack
Although written from a male convict's point of view, I immediately thought of the folk song Van Dieman's Land* as performed by the John Renbourn Group on the album Live in America (1982) which you can listen to on YouTube here or on Spotify here.
... My sentence was for fourteen years, and I was sent on board.Footnote
Now the ship set course from the land, the Speedwell was her name,
For full four months and more my boys, we plowed the raging main,
No land, no harbour could we see, believe it is no lie,
All around us one black water, above us one blue sky.
Now the first day that we made the land upon that fateful shore,
The planters gathered round us there, full twenty score and more,
They led us round like horses there and sold us out of hand,
Now they yoked us to the plow my boys, to plow Van Diemen's Land. - excerpt from the folk song "Van Dieman's Land".
* Alternate spelling for Van Diemen's Land on the John Renbourn Group's Live in America album credits, possibly a typo.
Trivia and Links
You can read further on the subject of female convicts transported from England & Ireland to Australia at Wikipedia and at the Female Convicts Research Centre.
Aside from the assaults, deprivations and punishments suffered by the female convicts on board the Astraea ship in the novel, there is also the shocking use of blistering powder as a medical treatment by the onboard surgeon. In the early 19th century this was still thought of as a "cure" for certain ailments. The source of the blistering agent Cantharidin is the same beetle as for the poisonous s0-called "aphrodisiac" Spanish Fly. You can read further at Medical blistering in the Georgian Era.
September 12, 2024
Astraea by Kate Kruimink is the winner of the 2024 Weatherglass Novella Prize, Weatherglass press then publishing the book. The judge for the prize was the wonderful Ali Smith, who citation read:
“A shipful of women corralled by a crew of men crosses an ocean whose swell is deeper and darker than imaginable. Is it a ghost ship? It’s a haunting matter. This powerful novella, historical and immediate, atmospheric, visceral, lyrical and frank, crosses the horizon between story, history and reality. Its passengers might be in the grip of some foul brutal institutional power but their life, their vitality and their survival form the beating heart of a unique read, the language of which forms a rough fabric so tangible you can feel it on your skin. The blood heat and the cool clean soul of this tale will stay with you long after you’re back on dry land.”
It's hard to improve on that as a review!
The novella is set on board a women's convict ship, transporting women for a variety of offences to Australia and opens:
It was six o'clock in the morning and the ocean was pooled dark glass. The sky was nothing, but also nothing else, not cloud nor sun nor moon. There was a slow creak in the air.
The maybe-friend Sarah Ward had poisoned herself again in the night and was convulsing in the hospital below. The other women in the pen had made flocks of themselves, bonnets fluttering, all done up to their necks in their coarse greys and browns like common pigeons. Even that terrible old madwoman had found company. But without Sarah Ward, the girl sat alone.
`I give you a riddle! What is neither here nor there?' called the madwoman to the eye-rolling friends about her. 'What is trees where no trees grow? What is thirst in water?'
It is narrated from the perspective of Maryanne Maginn, although we learn early on that Maryanne is a name assigned to her by a clerk at embarkment as he felt her given name was 'too French'.
Others of the women cried fairly often but she had felt tears an impossibility, as if they had been shocked out of her at the instant of her creation as Maryanne Maginn. But now, looking again out at the desert of water, she found she had to tighten her mouth and throat and heart like fists inside her body against weeping. She stood there forcing the tears away.
The ship was their shelter, the small chalice carrying them through that which was inhospitable to human life. But there was no shelter for her there, she thought. There was only a series of confines between which she might move but never escape. She understood this to be danger, when sadness and idleness might together unfix her from her present existence, from the all-that-there-is of the ship, and spin her backwards into those memories she could not entertain, not for the sake of her sanity, or spin her forward into anticipation of what was to come, which was to be a terror, most likely.
The well-crafted story introduces us to various of the women with whom Mary shares the voyage and her fate, the male crew playing more of a background role, as well as giving us insight into her backstory (or rather than of 'the dead girl with the French name').
[It was also fascinating to learn from the Foyles book launch that Mary is the target of the quest in Kruimink's debut novel [book:A Treacherous Country|53215487], a story set after Astraea.]
But the beauty of the story lies in the haunting, off-kilter prose, reflecting the sense of dislocation 'Maryanne' feels as a new born person and her deliberate guillotining (the word she uses, and a clue to her real name) of her past and future, focusing only on this 'protracted moment' in this confined and contained world-within-a-world.
An excellent choice for joint winner and I look forward to the co-winner Æarth, to be published early in 2024.
“A shipful of women corralled by a crew of men crosses an ocean whose swell is deeper and darker than imaginable. Is it a ghost ship? It’s a haunting matter. This powerful novella, historical and immediate, atmospheric, visceral, lyrical and frank, crosses the horizon between story, history and reality. Its passengers might be in the grip of some foul brutal institutional power but their life, their vitality and their survival form the beating heart of a unique read, the language of which forms a rough fabric so tangible you can feel it on your skin. The blood heat and the cool clean soul of this tale will stay with you long after you’re back on dry land.”
It's hard to improve on that as a review!
The novella is set on board a women's convict ship, transporting women for a variety of offences to Australia and opens:
It was six o'clock in the morning and the ocean was pooled dark glass. The sky was nothing, but also nothing else, not cloud nor sun nor moon. There was a slow creak in the air.
The maybe-friend Sarah Ward had poisoned herself again in the night and was convulsing in the hospital below. The other women in the pen had made flocks of themselves, bonnets fluttering, all done up to their necks in their coarse greys and browns like common pigeons. Even that terrible old madwoman had found company. But without Sarah Ward, the girl sat alone.
`I give you a riddle! What is neither here nor there?' called the madwoman to the eye-rolling friends about her. 'What is trees where no trees grow? What is thirst in water?'
It is narrated from the perspective of Maryanne Maginn, although we learn early on that Maryanne is a name assigned to her by a clerk at embarkment as he felt her given name was 'too French'.
Others of the women cried fairly often but she had felt tears an impossibility, as if they had been shocked out of her at the instant of her creation as Maryanne Maginn. But now, looking again out at the desert of water, she found she had to tighten her mouth and throat and heart like fists inside her body against weeping. She stood there forcing the tears away.
The ship was their shelter, the small chalice carrying them through that which was inhospitable to human life. But there was no shelter for her there, she thought. There was only a series of confines between which she might move but never escape. She understood this to be danger, when sadness and idleness might together unfix her from her present existence, from the all-that-there-is of the ship, and spin her backwards into those memories she could not entertain, not for the sake of her sanity, or spin her forward into anticipation of what was to come, which was to be a terror, most likely.
The well-crafted story introduces us to various of the women with whom Mary shares the voyage and her fate, the male crew playing more of a background role, as well as giving us insight into her backstory (or rather than of 'the dead girl with the French name').
[It was also fascinating to learn from the Foyles book launch that Mary is the target of the quest in Kruimink's debut novel [book:A Treacherous Country|53215487], a story set after Astraea.]
But the beauty of the story lies in the haunting, off-kilter prose, reflecting the sense of dislocation 'Maryanne' feels as a new born person and her deliberate guillotining (the word she uses, and a clue to her real name) of her past and future, focusing only on this 'protracted moment' in this confined and contained world-within-a-world.
An excellent choice for joint winner and I look forward to the co-winner Æarth, to be published early in 2024.
August 9, 2025
I read the first chapter of this novella and thought it was amazing writing, creative and lyrical, almost stream-of-consciousness in its fluidity. But as it went along, it slightly lost something and became a little more conventional in its style as the narrative developed, a basic third person narration with quite a lot of dialogue. That doesn't mean I didn't like it, it just didn't quite live up to that first chapter.
The book is about a group of convict women (and their children) aboard a ship from England and heading (though I don't recall it being overtly stated) to a penal colony in Australia. The whole book takes place in this confined space, an extremely isolated and claustrophobic environment. The primary character is Maryanne, a 15-year-old girl who, we later discover, has been forced to leave her newborn baby behind with a relative. The book never fully fleshes out the rest of the ship's contingent, its sailors a peripheral shadow in the background, the many women prisoners essentially kept at arm's length, and the ultimate destination somewhat vague. But this is fairly deliberate and works well for the piece creating an atmosphere of obscurity and solitude. We only really get to know the doctor, the chaplain, and some of the other women. Meanwhile, one of the women is very ill and another is pregnant but neither of them receive much care or compassion from these men.
The book does a good job of keeping things obscure, maintaining a kind of dystopian quality, an eerie sense of the other worldly, a nebulous uncertainty, the ship potentially being full of ghosts, lost souls, the swelling ocean a monstrous metaphor for death itself. While it's very effective and has echoes of other books playing with existential themes (I Who Have Never Known Men came to mind but that might just be due to the focus on women), it never quite reaches their levels. It's a good novella but ultimately a little too lightweight (and as I mentioned, I felt the writing dropped off as it went along). It also reminded me of The Sharks by Bjorneboe but that too might simply be the ship serving as a metaphor for life.
A nice eerie piece of speculative fiction which plays with a few intriguing ideas and conjures up a dreamlike atmosphere. Despite the flaws, I enjoyed it and would definitely recommend.
The book is about a group of convict women (and their children) aboard a ship from England and heading (though I don't recall it being overtly stated) to a penal colony in Australia. The whole book takes place in this confined space, an extremely isolated and claustrophobic environment. The primary character is Maryanne, a 15-year-old girl who, we later discover, has been forced to leave her newborn baby behind with a relative. The book never fully fleshes out the rest of the ship's contingent, its sailors a peripheral shadow in the background, the many women prisoners essentially kept at arm's length, and the ultimate destination somewhat vague. But this is fairly deliberate and works well for the piece creating an atmosphere of obscurity and solitude. We only really get to know the doctor, the chaplain, and some of the other women. Meanwhile, one of the women is very ill and another is pregnant but neither of them receive much care or compassion from these men.
The book does a good job of keeping things obscure, maintaining a kind of dystopian quality, an eerie sense of the other worldly, a nebulous uncertainty, the ship potentially being full of ghosts, lost souls, the swelling ocean a monstrous metaphor for death itself. While it's very effective and has echoes of other books playing with existential themes (I Who Have Never Known Men came to mind but that might just be due to the focus on women), it never quite reaches their levels. It's a good novella but ultimately a little too lightweight (and as I mentioned, I felt the writing dropped off as it went along). It also reminded me of The Sharks by Bjorneboe but that too might simply be the ship serving as a metaphor for life.
A nice eerie piece of speculative fiction which plays with a few intriguing ideas and conjures up a dreamlike atmosphere. Despite the flaws, I enjoyed it and would definitely recommend.
November 5, 2024
One of two winners of the inaugural Weatherglass Novella Prize, as chosen by Ali Smith. Taking place within about a day and a half on a 19th-century convict ship bound for Australia, it is the intense story of a group of women and children chafing against the constraints men have set for them. The protagonist is just 15 years old and postpartum. Within a hostile environment, the women have created an almost cosy community based on sisterhood. They look out for each other; an old midwife can still bestow her skills.
The ship’s doctor and chaplain distrust what they call the “conspiracy of women” and are embarrassed by the bodily reality of one going into labour, another tending to an ill baby, and a third haemorrhaging. They have no doubt they know what is best for their charges yet can barely be bothered to learn their names.
Indeed, naming is key here. The main character is effectively erased from the historical record when a clerk incorrectly documents her as Maryanne Maginn. Maryanne’s only “maybe-friend,” red-haired Sarah, has the surname Ward. “Astraea” is the name not just of the ship they travel on but also of a star goddess and a new baby onboard.
The drama in this novella arises from the women’s attempts to assert their autonomy. Female rage and rebellion meet with punishment, including a memorable scene of solitary confinement. A carpenter then constructs a “nice little locking box that will hold you when you sin, until you’re sorry for it and your souls are much recovered,” as he tells the women. They are all convicts, and now their discipline will become a matter of religious theatrics.
Given the limitations of setting and time and the preponderance of dialogue, I could imagine this making a powerful play. The novella length is as useful a framework as the ship itself. Kruimink doesn’t waste time on backstory; what matters is not what these women have done to end up here, but how their treatment is an affront to their essential dignity. Even in such a low page count, though, there are intriguing traces of the past and future, as well as a fleeting hint of homoeroticism. I would recommend this to readers of The Mercies by Kiran Millwood Hargrave, Devotion by Hannah Kent and Women Talking by Miriam Toews. And if you get a hankering to follow up on the story, you can: this functions as a prequel to Kruimink’s first novel, A Treacherous Country.
Originally published on my blog, Bookish Beck.
The ship was their shelter, the small chalice carrying them through that which was inhospitable to human life. But there was no shelter for her there, she thought. There was only a series of confines between which she might move but never escape.
The ship’s doctor and chaplain distrust what they call the “conspiracy of women” and are embarrassed by the bodily reality of one going into labour, another tending to an ill baby, and a third haemorrhaging. They have no doubt they know what is best for their charges yet can barely be bothered to learn their names.
Indeed, naming is key here. The main character is effectively erased from the historical record when a clerk incorrectly documents her as Maryanne Maginn. Maryanne’s only “maybe-friend,” red-haired Sarah, has the surname Ward. “Astraea” is the name not just of the ship they travel on but also of a star goddess and a new baby onboard.
The drama in this novella arises from the women’s attempts to assert their autonomy. Female rage and rebellion meet with punishment, including a memorable scene of solitary confinement. A carpenter then constructs a “nice little locking box that will hold you when you sin, until you’re sorry for it and your souls are much recovered,” as he tells the women. They are all convicts, and now their discipline will become a matter of religious theatrics.
Given the limitations of setting and time and the preponderance of dialogue, I could imagine this making a powerful play. The novella length is as useful a framework as the ship itself. Kruimink doesn’t waste time on backstory; what matters is not what these women have done to end up here, but how their treatment is an affront to their essential dignity. Even in such a low page count, though, there are intriguing traces of the past and future, as well as a fleeting hint of homoeroticism. I would recommend this to readers of The Mercies by Kiran Millwood Hargrave, Devotion by Hannah Kent and Women Talking by Miriam Toews. And if you get a hankering to follow up on the story, you can: this functions as a prequel to Kruimink’s first novel, A Treacherous Country.
Originally published on my blog, Bookish Beck.
September 25, 2024
This was absolutely fantastic. A raw and moving story.
Kate has done such a great job of humanising the names on the lists that she discovered in her research, women who were treated with such a lack of empathy.
We know it’s set on a convict ship, but what I love is that we never learn why the women are they, or what they have done. Their past, their mistakes and the awful things they’re going through doesn’t define them and each character is given depth and meaning that they deserve.
Kate has done such a great job of humanising the names on the lists that she discovered in her research, women who were treated with such a lack of empathy.
We know it’s set on a convict ship, but what I love is that we never learn why the women are they, or what they have done. Their past, their mistakes and the awful things they’re going through doesn’t define them and each character is given depth and meaning that they deserve.
April 11, 2025
This got me. Didn't think I had quite enough of a grasp on the plot until about the hundred page mark, and it all hit me at once. Really beautiful, intimate exploration of one tiny life in a near-apocalyptic situation. The main character's mental compartmentalising makes the ship feel almost abstract, like a pocket dimension away from any real, tangible world. Tender
July 24, 2025
If you liked I Who Have Never Known Men but just *wished* that the MC could find sisterhood with the other women in her bunker, THIS is the book for you. Maybe I'm becoming a bit of a novella girly because I read Aerth earlier this year which came from the same Weatherglass Books Novella Prize and I found it so charming yet existential that I devoured the whole thing in a day. Welp, that might be a trend with the books in this collection because I just read this whole thing in one sitting. Granted, we're looking at about 100 pages of big text on a small page, but still, I kinda ate this up? On paper, for the novellas selected for the award, this one is slated to be my least favorite. It combines many of my least favorite things: historical fiction, sleazy doctors, the horrors of childbirth, explicit descriptions of vomit... but somehow I didn't really care? Coming off so many books about women on the brink of madness who descend into apathy, it was really refreshing to read a book where the MC tried SO HARD to do that and yet came over to the solidarity of sisterhood pretty quickly.
First of all, there are some lines and ideas in this book that are absolutely *STUNNING* to read. I've always said that when I die I want to be composted so that I can grow into a tree and I've never heard anyone make such a beautiful, eloquent case for why that's actually the best way ever to be disposed of after death, so I have to share it with ya'll here:
*ahem*
"I imagined that [they] would sink gently into the grass, and the earth would become soft... and it would close back over them and there would be a lump which would then sink down and the grass would be just as soft and green and sweet as it had been before...
I had seen the coffins go many times into the dirt of the churchyard, I could not picture any person I loved, or any person at all in that sad place. Instead I would close my eyes and pretend we had carried that person out onto the grass and laid them down there not in any box at all, to be - yes - received."
I mean, oh my god. If you can't stand a run-on sentence, I mean, run quickly away from this book, but if Kate Kruimink just convinced you to have a human composting burial then go read this book ASAP.
Also, besides being beautifully written, this book is also kind of hillarious at times and pokes fun and men (chaplains especially) in just the best ways. Since it's late and I can't describe it well enough to ya'll I'll insert another quote here, which occurs during a sermon in which one girl on the ship stands up for another:
"He did not know what to do with that act of honest fellowship, and so he hemmed and hawed and finally ignored it and read on."
Basically, this guy is a clueless diva for the whole duration of this book. Between that and the heartwarming fellowship that develops among the prisoners, the story balances the horror of these women's circumstances with small rays of hope at every turn.
Finally, I will assert that Maryanne / [I cannot spoil this girl's actual name for you, it's too good of a reveal] is a lesbian. In this essay I will...
First of all, there are some lines and ideas in this book that are absolutely *STUNNING* to read. I've always said that when I die I want to be composted so that I can grow into a tree and I've never heard anyone make such a beautiful, eloquent case for why that's actually the best way ever to be disposed of after death, so I have to share it with ya'll here:
*ahem*
"I imagined that [they] would sink gently into the grass, and the earth would become soft... and it would close back over them and there would be a lump which would then sink down and the grass would be just as soft and green and sweet as it had been before...
I had seen the coffins go many times into the dirt of the churchyard, I could not picture any person I loved, or any person at all in that sad place. Instead I would close my eyes and pretend we had carried that person out onto the grass and laid them down there not in any box at all, to be - yes - received."
I mean, oh my god. If you can't stand a run-on sentence, I mean, run quickly away from this book, but if Kate Kruimink just convinced you to have a human composting burial then go read this book ASAP.
Also, besides being beautifully written, this book is also kind of hillarious at times and pokes fun and men (chaplains especially) in just the best ways. Since it's late and I can't describe it well enough to ya'll I'll insert another quote here, which occurs during a sermon in which one girl on the ship stands up for another:
"He did not know what to do with that act of honest fellowship, and so he hemmed and hawed and finally ignored it and read on."
Basically, this guy is a clueless diva for the whole duration of this book. Between that and the heartwarming fellowship that develops among the prisoners, the story balances the horror of these women's circumstances with small rays of hope at every turn.
Finally, I will assert that Maryanne / [I cannot spoil this girl's actual name for you, it's too good of a reveal] is a lesbian. In this essay I will...
December 23, 2024
An interesting insight into the forgotten women en route to a penal colony.
Despite this being just over 100 pages there was always a lot going on per page; lots of names and background to go through. The narration jumps between intimate and lightly comedic? In its description.
The patriarchy tramples the spirit of these women but there’s something endearing about their community and how they look out for each other.
3 stars for me as I fear this may have been too lit fic for my liking …..
Despite this being just over 100 pages there was always a lot going on per page; lots of names and background to go through. The narration jumps between intimate and lightly comedic? In its description.
The patriarchy tramples the spirit of these women but there’s something endearing about their community and how they look out for each other.
3 stars for me as I fear this may have been too lit fic for my liking …..
August 7, 2025
Moving novella set at sea, I raced through it
July 19, 2025
'The name designates the thing, and without the name, the thing is impossible to hold in the mind.' P.19
A truly beautiful read.
The strength and kindness of the women, and the caring way the author shapes their characters and reveals the impossibility of surviving as a woman throughout history, brings their resilience out in waves that gripped me enough to nearly cry on the tube.
A huge thank you again to my sister, who always buys me my favourite books.
A truly beautiful read.
The strength and kindness of the women, and the caring way the author shapes their characters and reveals the impossibility of surviving as a woman throughout history, brings their resilience out in waves that gripped me enough to nearly cry on the tube.
A huge thank you again to my sister, who always buys me my favourite books.
January 7, 2025
This is a book that probably requires more than one reading. An eerie, claustrophobic tale about shipful of convict women sailing across the ocean. The author does not spell out exactly where the women are headed but we presume Australia because of the mentions of the Scottish doctor, Liverpool and Ireland. The main narrator, Maryanne, is only fifteen and we gradually learn she has had to give away a baby - which is presumably why she is on the ship. The captain takes advantage of some women and the doctor is cruel, and yet, despite the conditions, the women find some comfort together. A strange and unsettling novella, the language both poetic and sparing.
May 9, 2025
This potent novella is set among a group of convict women being transported from England on a ship. When we are and where the women are going are not stated precisely, but you may notice that the 15-year-old protagonist, Maryanne Maginn, shares her name with the missing girl at the heart of Kate Kruimink's debut novel set during convict-era Tasmania. Astraea possesses the same strange core — these are sustained explorations of the past as a foreign country. Read more on my blog.
July 5, 2025
Stunningly good novella about a ship full of convict women being transported. We don’t know where they came from other than Great Britain, where they are going, what they have done or anything about their previous lives. We do, however, learn a lot about the horrors involved in such journeys, prey to sadistic and incompetent doctors and chaplains and lecherous captains.
Historical novels don’t come much better than this!
Historical novels don’t come much better than this!
January 7, 2025
Relentlessly harrowing, eerily calm. A story that is dreamlike in its tone, violent in its telling. A group of female convicts imprisoned on a ship, the destination or circumstances that put them there not known. The sway of the ship as the women struggle to survive alongside one another.
September 8, 2024
Winner of the Weatherglass Novella Prize in 2024, Ali Smith the judge.
November 4, 2024
Women imprisoned on a boat to an unknown destination, oppressed by male captors for reasons unclear. Visceral and poetic historical fiction.
November 7, 2024
Gorgeous novella based on ship surgeon logs on women convict voyages to Australia - sad and beautiful
December 20, 2024
This book is amazing - SO beautifully written and despite the subject matter it’s quite uplifting
January 24, 2025
4.5 stars
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April 5, 2025when buying this book the seller said I had excellent taste and I won the best customer award and I’m better than y’all
April 18, 2025
Claustrophobic af and literally inhaled this
April 23, 2025
This is bleak and gripping. Hard to put down and I wanted much more.
July 28, 2025
Beautiful read about the struggles of 19th century women in the confines of a ship
August 10, 2025
Lyrically written and utterly bleak. I struggled with the lack of context for the characters and I’m not certain about the ending
December 11, 2025
this was sad at some point.
December 29, 2025
I thought it was interesting writing but I think I must have missed the point of the book
November 17, 2024
Could not put this down. I love the way Kate has given us just a tiny glimpse in to the lives of these women. With small parts of them being uncovered but never really knowing their whole story, just what is happening in this tiny moment of their lives.
What a fabulous novella.
What a fabulous novella.
May 22, 2025
So much and yet so little happens in this capsule of a story. On a ship headed to a penal colony (ostensibly Australia or thereabouts), a group of condemned women attempt to survive in whatever way that means for them individually. We lack a hero and any real catharsis in this novella, the characters operate without any significant backstory (what we are granted by the end is our main character's real name), and the stage is the size of a 2 bedroom apartment, yet all that serves to highlight a realness and an immediacy to the narrative. On a wooden ship in the middle of the ocean, the rest of the world and its history falls away, and life plays out in all the normal ways plus some totally abnormal ways. Kruimink stirs in a fair amount of wry humor to remind us these are people.
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March 12, 2025A bit grim
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