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Farrar, Straus and Giroux
May 2008
On Sale: May 13, 2008
240 pages
ISBN: 0374150974
EAN: 9780374150976
Hardcover
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Fiction
With Exiles, Ron Hansen tells the story of a notorious
shipwreck that prompted Gerard Manley Hopkins to break
years of “elected silence” with an outpouring of dazzling
poetry. In December 1875 the steamship Deutschland left Bremen,
bound for England and then America. On board were five
young nuns who, exiled by Bismarck’s laws against Catholic
religious orders, were going to begin their lives anew in
Missouri. Early one morning, the ship ran aground in the
Thames and more than sixty lives were lost—including those
of the five nuns. Hopkins was a Jesuit seminarian in Wales, and he was so
moved by the news of the shipwreck that he wrote a grand
poem about it, his first serious work since abandoning a
literary career at Oxford to become a priest. He too would
die young, an exile from the literary world. But as
Hansen’s gorgeously written account of Hopkins’s life makes
clear, he fulfilled his calling. Combining a thrilling tragedy at sea with the seeming
shipwreck of Hopkins’s own life, Exiles joins Hansen’s
Mariette in Ecstasy (called “an astonishingly deft and
provocative novel” by The New York Times) as a novel that
dramatizes the passionate inner search of religious life
and makes it accessible to us in the way that only great
art can.
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