Who are you when all you hold dear is gone?
From the moment London midwife Maggie Bloodworth steals a handful of clothes she's in a fight for her soul.
Banished in 1790 to a world where right and wrong have no meaning, she strives to find a path that is more than surviving, and a way to return to her abandoned daughter. All the while, she is haunted by her mother's dying vision that she is marked in some way.
From England to Sydney Cove, far-flung Norfolk Island, and the wilds of Van Diemen's Land, she must reckon with how to be a good person in a bad world, even as she becomes an adulterer, bigamist, and interloper in a land that's not hers.
But the greatest test is yet to come, in a letter she's not meant to see, exposing the lie at the heart of all she's wrested from hardship, and the betrayal of the man she's come to trust.
A profound story, based on real events and characters, it lays bare the hidden truth of what one woman, and many others, sacrificed for the shaping of a nation.