Set aboard a transport ship carrying convict women from England, Astraea follows fifteen-year-old Maryanne Maginn through the enclosed, unstable world of incarceration at sea.

Kate Kruimink keeps the historical frame deliberately imprecise, stripping the setting back to its governing conditions—confinement, illness, hierarchy, dread—while Maryanne moves between the women’s quarters and the ship’s hospital, trying to understand both her fellow prisoners and the possibility of remaking herself within the brutal logic of transport.

What gives the novella its force is the tension between compression and strangeness. The women’s earlier lives are only glimpsed, but they press on every scene; the sea, the ship, and the charged intimacies between the women become the whole available world. Kruimink writes this not as costume-historical fiction but as something more severed and uncanny—a past rendered as its own foreign atmosphere, where violence, secrecy, and fragile forms of attachment sit just below the surface.

Weatherglass Books paperback edition (year not specified; prize-stickered copy). Clean with light general wear; no major faults visible.