Hannah Kent · 2021 · sea

Hannah Kent's 2021 novel, inspired by the 1838 emigration of Prussian Old Lutherans who fled religious persecution for the colony of South Australia. Fifteen-year-old Hanne, a child of the forest at odds with the world of women, finds in her friend Thea a love that the long, deadly sea voyage and the strange new land cannot contain. From a secret-worshipping village in Prussia to a German settlement in the Adelaide Hills, it is a luminous story of faith, nature and a love that becomes something larger than itself.

1. 1
   Kay

   In the Prussian village of Kay the Old Lutherans worship in secret in the forest, their faith outlawed by a king bent on uniting the churches; Hanne Nussbaum loves the woods, and loves Thea.

2. 2
   Hamburg

   Granted leave at last to emigrate, the congregation travels to Hamburg and crowds aboard the ship Kristi, bound for the far side of the world.

3. 3
   Port Adelaide

   Months at sea, down the Atlantic and round the Cape, with typhus in the hold and whale-song in the dark, before they make landfall in South Australia.

4. 4
   Hahndorf

   In the hills above Adelaide, on Peramangk country, they raise a new German village, where Hanne's devotion to Thea outlasts even death.