Exiles: A Novel - Softcover

Hansen, Ron

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0312428340 ISBN 13: 9780312428341

Publisher: Picador, 2009

Synopsis

In December 1875 the steamship Deutschland left Bremen, Germany, bound for America. On board were five nuns, exiled by a ban on religious orders, bound to begin their lives anew in Missouri. Their journey would end when the Deutschland ran aground at the mouth of the Thames and all five drowned. Ron Hansen tells their harrowing story, but also that of the poet and seminarian Gerard Manly Hopkins, and how the shipwreck moved him to write a grand poem, a revelatory work read throughout the world today. Combining a thrilling tragedy at sea, with the seeming shipwreck of Hopkins's own life, "Hansen brilliantly, if soberly, weaves two interrelated story lines into a riveting novel" (Booklist on Exiles).

About this title

About the Author:

RON HANSEN's several novels include The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, and Atticus, a finalist for the National Book Award.

From Publishers Weekly:

Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889) wrote some of the most beautiful and innovative poetry in English of the late 19th century. In Hansen's vivid fiction, Hopkins is a promising Oxford graduate who writes verse throughout college, converts to Roman Catholicism in his early 20s and takes church orders. Those acts ostracize him from his family and silence his poetry. In parallel with Hopkins's story, Hansen explores the event that jolts Hopkins back into writing in 1875: the sinking of the Deutschland—whose victims include five Catholic nuns exiled from Germany by Bismarck—at the mouth of the Thames. Delivering a deft blend of literary biography and disaster tale, Hansen (Mariette in Ecstasy, etc.) wrings a white-knuckled drama out of the lives of the poet/priest and five extraordinary German women, who were headed to St. Louis, Mo., to lead the American branch of their order. As for Hopkins, his poetry is poorly received for its unconventionality, and his Jesuit superiors punish him for his oddities (Hansen steers clear of Hopkins's sexuality). Hansen finds in the difficult paths of six remarkable people the pursuit of a tranquil, soothing God of intimacy and tolerance and unquenchable love. Fans of Hopkins's verse will cherish the chance to revisit the astonishing 280-line The Wreck of the Deutschland, reprinted as a coda. (May)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Picador
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 0312428340
• ISBN 13: 9780312428341
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 240