Christina Baker Kline

A Jamestown centennial volume her mother-in-law produced during a snowbound visit, Century of Stories, set Christina Baker Kline on the research that became Orphan Train. Her husband's grandfather Frank Robertson was said in the family to have ridden one of the trains that carried orphaned and abandoned children out of eastern cities to farm households across the Midwest between 1854 and 1929. Her own digging never confirmed it, and placed the Robertsons in Missouri rather than New York. Kline's 2013 novel braids two lives: Molly Ayer, seventeen and shuttled through foster homes on the Maine coast, and Vivian Daly, ninety-one, whose attic Molly clears as community service and whose own journey west surfaces box by box. The book held a place on the American bestseller list for more than two years, five of those weeks at number one, and was published in forty countries. Kline was born in Cambridge, England in 1964 and grew up there, in the American South and in Maine, then studied at Yale, Cambridge and the University of Virginia. Her other novels include A Piece of the World, The Exiles and Sweet Water.