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.

Ron Hansen's seven novels include "Desperadoes," "The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford," "Mariette in Ecstasy," and "Atticus," a finalist for the National Book Award. He teaches at Santa Clara University in Northern California.

In "Exiles," Ron Hansen tells the story of the notorious shipwreck of the steamship "Deutschland" that prompted Gerard Manley Hopkins to break years of "elected silence" with an outpouring of poetry.
In December 1875, the "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. It was 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 fluidly written account of Hopkins's life makes clear, the poet fulfilled his calling.
Combining a tragedy at sea with the seeming shipwreck of Hopkins's own life, "Exiles" is a novel that dramatizes the passionate inner search of religious life and makes it accessible to scholars of religious and literary history.

"The great Sicilian mystery writer Leonardo Sciascia once quipped, 'A man who dies tragically is, at any moment of his life, a man who will die tragically.' For the historical novelist, this is a potent proposal--essentially, the dramatic key to a story in which the ending is predetermined and plot twists are not an option. In Ron Hansen's novel "Exiles," the dramatic inevitable belongs to the five drowned German nuns to whose memory the Victorian poet Gerard Manley Hopkins dedicated perhaps his most important work, 'The Wreck of the Deutschland, ' a poem that was neither understood during his lifetime nor terribly well-liked. Returning to the religious territory of his acclaimed 1991 book, "Mariette in Ecstasy," Hansen tells the story of the poet-turned-Jesuit seminarian so moved by news of the 1875 shipwreck that he breaks a seven-year abstinence from writing to compose a tribute. Hansen's novel, like the poem it's based on, takes up the dramatic scene aboard the Deutschland, a grisly, slow-motion sequence in which 157 people die from exposure, drowning or battering waves after the German steamship ran aground on a sandbar in the North Sea . . . Hansen's portraits are sincere and affectionate."--Minna Proctor, "Los Angeles"" Times
"""Exiles" by Santa Clara professor Ron Hansen, is the brave fictional account of the life of English Jesuit Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889), and of his writing 'The Wreck of the Deutschland.' The fiction does not deviate from what is known about Hopkins' life, or the shipwreck (1875), but it adds the dimension of a fine novelist's interpretative art."--Michael D. Langan, "The Buffalo News
""One cold night in December 1875, the German steamship "Deutschland" ran aground in the Thames estuary in England, and more than 60 people died, including five young nuns who, exiled by Bismarck's laws against Catholic religious orders, were on their way to begin a new work in Missouri. This tragedy captured the imagination of a young Jesuit named Gerard Manley Hopkins, and he began working on a long poem, 'The Wreck of the Deutschland, ' that would help catapult him long after his death into the upper echelons of British poets. In "Exiles" (his seventh novel), Ron Hansen imagines the lives of the five nuns and Hopkins and draws on themes of faith and identity. He paints these characters as exiles in their different ways as they struggled to follow their vocations. As he did in his first two novels, "Desperadoes" and "The Assassination of Jesse James," Hansen combines meticulous historical research with his novelist's skill at creating character and drama. Clearly he is most absorbed with Hopkins, the sensitive and eccentric seminarian who abandoned his literary career to pursue the priesthood, to whom Hansen gives the most pages. Yet his accounts of the five nuns, about which 'very little is know, ' he writes in 'A Note on Sources, ' are where the novel comes most alive. As readers we are drawn to these obscure German women who come out of ordinary homes yet are drawn to the religious life. And we are moved as they face their deaths on the ship when 'forty-four passengers and twenty crew . . . died between five in the morning on December 6th and sunrise on December 7th' . . . Once another seminari