Setting sail

The spark that started Kline on the path to “The Exiles” ignited from a New York Times article on convict women shipped to Australia.

“When you’re writing novels, you draw inspiration from all different sources,” Kline says. “You don’t always quite know why things appeal to you.”

She’d first read about the convict transports in her historian father’s copy of “The Fatal Shore,” Robert Hughes’ landmark history of the settling of Australia, a country where she briefly lived as a graduate student.

With her mother, a professor of English and women’s studies, she’d collaborated on an oral history on feminist women. In her own career, she taught writing to women inmates.

“So that experience of reading that piece, I realized now, tapped into all of these things,” Kline says. “The fact that I spent six weeks in Australia when I was in my 20s. The fact that I wrote a book where I interviewed 60 women about the sort of hidden secrets in their lives. And then also this teaching in two different women’s prisons, which made me really interested in why and how women end up incarcerated.”

And while the story is set in the 1840s, Kline says its themes of race and class and gender felt fresh and relevant in today’s world, a point that’s been important in her work, especially as more recent work such as the bestseller “Orphan Train” has shifted from contemporary stories to historical fiction.

“I didn’t think I had any interest in writing novels set in the past, and in