Seduced by her employer's son, Evangeline, a naïve young governess in early nineteenth-century London, is discharged when her pregnancy is discovered and sent to the notorious Newgate Prison. After months in the fetid, overcrowded jail, she learns she is sentenced to "the land beyond the seas," Van Diemen's Land, a penal colony in Australia. Though uncertain of what awaits, Evangeline knows one thing: the child she carries will be born on the months-long...

Convicted of treason and transported to the prison colony at New South Wales, Will Laurence and his fighting dragon, Temeraire, encounter complications after the colony's governor, Captain William Bligh, is overthrown.