The year is 1857. Twelve-year-old Tess Roy lives in Castle Dunroy, Scotland. Her life changes dramatically when her mother dies and a new landlord forces Tess and her father off the land they've farmed for generations. They are given passage to the New World aboard Borealis, a ship bound from Liverpool to Fort Victoria, Vancouver Island. Aboard ship, Tess meets girls her own age who are too poor to ride above deck and a nineteen-year-old Navy deserter turned Gold Rush prospector named Jock. Once she lands on Vancouver Island, Tess meets Chinese, black, and First Nations settlers and learns of the trade in women. She and her father struggle to make a new home in this strange, sometimes forbidding, and sometimes exotic world. Here is classic engagingly historical fiction by a talented writer who brings a fateful voyage across the ocean and the fascinating frontier of North America in the 1850s vividly to life.