The Last Runaway
TRACY CHEVALIER
The Borough Press
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
First published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2013
Copyright © Tracy Chevalier 2013
Map © John Gilkes 2013
Cover design by Holly Macdonald © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2019
Cover image © Shutterstock.com
Tracy Chevalier asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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Ebook Edition © ISBN: 9780007517312
Version: 2019-06-07
This book is dedicated to Catoctin Quaker Camp
and Oberlin College:
two places that shaped and guided my younger self
Contents
Read on for an extract from Tracy Chevalier’s new novel, At the Edge of the Orchard
SHE COULD NOT GO back. When Honor Bright abruptly announced to her family that she would accompany her sister Grace to America – when she sorted through her belongings, keeping only the most necessary, when she gave away all of her quilts, when she said goodbye to her uncles and aunts, and kissed her cousins and nieces and nephews, when she got into the coach that would take them from Bridport, when she and Grace linked arms and walked up the gangplank at Bristol – she did all of these things with the unspoken thought: I can always come back. Layered beneath those words, however, was the suspicion that the moment her feet left English soil, Honor’s life would be permanently altered.
At least the idea of returning drew the sting from her actions in the weeks leading up to their departure, like the pinch of sugar secretly added to a sauce to tame its acid. It allowed her to remain calm, and not cry as her friend Biddy did when Honor gave her the quilt she had just finished: a patchwork of brown, yellow and cream diamonds pieced into an eight-point Star of Bethlehem, then quilted with harps and the