What happens when you're cast out from everything you love and know?

From the moment London midwife Maggie Bloodworth steals a handful of clothes she's in a fight for survival and her very soul.

Banished in 1790 to a world where right and wrong have no meaning, she must live by her own rules amidst deprivation and cruelty, and strive for a way to return to her abandoned daughter. All the while, she's haunted by her mother's dying vision that she's 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 learned to trust.

A profound story, based on a real character and events, it lays bare the hidden truth of what one woman, and many others, sacrificed for the shaping of a nation.

This Savage World is Anna Housego's fourth novel. She is also the author of Crows On The Roof, One Small Life, and The Way To Midnight.