The home child

In 1908, Eliza Showell, twelve years old and newly orphaned, boards a ship that will carry her from the slums of the Black Country to rural Nova Scotia. She will never return to Britain or see her family again. She is a Home Child, one of thousands of British children sent to Canada to work as indentured farm labourers and domestic servants. In luminous and tender poems, Eliza’s world unfolds, a place where ordinary things are transfigured into treasures – a red ribbon, the feel of a foal’s mane, the sound of her name on someone’s lips. With nothing to call her own, the wild beauty of Cape Breton is the only solace Eliza has – until another Home Child, a boy, comes to the farm and changes everything.