A deeply absorbing, intimate and visceral journey to the past, this beautifully-written novella is an intense but brief time machine into a harsh but very real period. Showing where hope shines in even the darkest of times, our August Book of the Month is Astraea by Kate Kruimink. A winner of the Inaugural Weatherglass Novella Prize, this small but powerful title is a stunning piece of artistry and a shocking eyeopener.
From the beginning, the reader is dropped right in the middle of an early 19th century ship, the scene skillfully painted within a page or two. With nothing in sight except for the relentless sky and its eternal reflection in the unforgiving ocean, the isolation for this cargo of convict women becomes increasingly stark. Having to spend seemingly endless days on a ship to a penal colony, the women face oppression not only from the ruthless rocking of the ship but from the cruel patriarchal domination and abuse from the captain, officers, sailors, and most prominently, the ship’s doctor, on whom they have no choice but to depend on in their various states of sickness and pregnancy. The novella focuses on a 15-year-old girl, renamed Maryanne by a clerk who deemed her original name ‘too French’, and her relations with the other women, particularly her drawing affinity and care for another young girl on the ship who poisoned herself. As the days on the ship come and go, we learn of some of the lives and the unfair convictions of the women, the severe punishments they must suffer, the brutal 19th century methods of the doctor’s approaches, and the community that the women find in each other. Though trapped in a heavily oppressive and misogynistic institution, Maryanne finds ways to comfort and fight for her fellow convicts and keep a sense of lucidity and liberation through the violent castigations against her, as well as enduring her own struggles with her past.
Though just over a hundred pages, the narrative is so engrossing that it seems more like we are witnessing these events rather than passively reading them. It is revealed at the end of the book that the novella is partly inspired from real journals from ship’s surgeons on women’s convict ships, making the abominable events in the narrative even more visceral and appalling.
Heartbreaking, gut wrenching, uplifting and mesmerising, this is a story that will shake ripples into the world, more than just fiction or history alone, but something more powerful combined. Though the title of the book itself is an unusual one, the reasons of its meaning become clear by the end. Just remember there is great power in a name.
A novella of clarity and strange grace, etched with a fierce and patient skill
Sebastian Barry
This powerful novella, historical and immediate, atmospheric, visceral, lyrical and frank, crosses the horizon between story, history and reality. The blood heat and the cool clean soul of this tale will stay with you long after you’re back on dry land.
Ali Smith
Astraea by Kate Kruimink is published by Weatherglass Books
9781739570767 | PB | £9.99 | 22nd August 2024
