A story of enduring love and friendship, and bold wild women who refuse the dictates of their times.London 1833: The cast-out child of an aristocratic mother, Hannah 'Birdie' Bird is a laundry maid with a hidden past and a suspicion that the wealthy family she serves is hers.Longing for beauty and liberation, Birdie risks everything to change her circumstances. She falls into love and crime, committing an audacious heist. When she is betrayed, she finds herself swept into a wave of female convicts, transported to the ends of her known world.The journey to the early Australian settlement drives the women to deepest despair. Birdie finds wonder in even this darkest hour, and forms deep bonds with her fellow prisoners. But greater than even the trials onboard is the fear of what awaits them in Sydney Cove.What chance does Birdie have of beating the odds? Can she fight her way to freedom?Drawn from the rarely celebrated true stories of female convicts, this striking...

'"I live at the end of a gravel road at the top of a valley consumed by bush. My husband is here, and my three girls. But the bush swallows them up like the road." I wrote those words at the kitchen table in 1983. A letter to the mother I'd never met. But how do you convey your life in a few sentences when almost every memory is missing?' Barbara Sumner grew up in a family filled with secrets and lies. At twenty-three she decided she had to find her mother. Remarkable, moving, beautifully written, Tree of Strangers is a ripping account of a search for identity in a country governed by adoption laws that deny the rights of the adopted person.