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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 βelected silenceβ 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 Bismarckβs 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 lostβincluding 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 Hansenβs gorgeously written account of Hopkinsβs life makes clear, he fulfilled his calling. Combining a thrilling tragedy at sea with the seeming shipwreck of Hopkinsβs own life, Exiles joins Hansenβs Mariette in Ecstasy (called βan astonishingly deft and provocative novelβ 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.
 Media BuzzFresh Air - NPR - June 11, 2008
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