'Stunning, moving, and remarkable' Nguyen Phan Que Mai, internationally bestselling author of The Mountains Sing and Dust Child 'A celebration of complicity and love among women' Pilar Quintana, shortlisted for the National Book Award, author of The Bitch and Abyss 'I haven't been this swept away by a piece of historical fiction since Maggie O'Farrell's Hamnet' Jess Walter, bestselling author of Beautiful Ruins Paris, 1720. The Hospice of La Salpêtrière is overrun with 'difficult' women. Halfway around the world, on the American frontier, French settlers are in want of wives. At the asylum, a list is drawn up: eighty-eight women of childbearing age to be shipped to New Orleans. Among them are Charlotte, Geneviève and Pétronille - a sharp-tongued orphan, an accused abortionist and a rumoured madwoman. They make the voyage over the ocean, knowing nothing of the harsh and extraordinary lives that await them, or how they will come to love and betray each other time and again in this wild