HEARTS OF WHITE FIRE Two Novels: Hearts in Exile and White Fire
by JOHN OXENHAM. Modernized with a new Introduction by Colin Heston
In two novels published a year apart, John Oxenham sent his readers to opposite ends of the earth. One is set in the frozen prison camps of Tsarist Siberia and the other among the coral reefs of the South Pacific. Yet both tell the same story: what happens when love and conviction burn so fiercely that they will carry a person anywhere, at any cost.
In Hearts in Exile (1904), Hope Arskaïa gives her hand not to Paul Pavlof, the young doctor who adores her, but to his friend Serge Palma, who will share her dangerous work for Russia’s oppressed. When both men are condemned to Siberia, Paul makes a secret sacrifice on the long convict road that binds the three of them together. Hope follows her husband five thousand miles to the penal settlement at Kara, only to find what she least expects.
In White Fire (1905), Jean Arnot, a spirited Scottish heiress, defies convention by proposing marriage to Kenneth Blair, a missionary home from the South Seas. Aboard their armed schooner, the Torch, they sail for the Dark Islands. There they confront tribal warfare, epidemic, natural catastrophe, and the “blackbirders” who kidnap islanders for forced labor.
John Oxenham, the pen name of William Arthur Dunkerley (1852–1941), was a bestselling novelist and poet whose hymn “In Christ There Is No East or West” is still sung today. These two adventure romances show him at his most energetic, combining fast-moving plots with stories of courage, faith, and self-sacrifice.
This Read-Me.Org Modernized-Classic has American spelling and modern typography while keeping Oxenham’s text and chapters intact. It includes fourteen original illustrations by G. Grenville Manton. Colin Heston’s new Introduction places the novels in their historical setting, from the Russian exile system to the Pacific labor trade, and discusses candidly the period attitudes modern readers will meet. Review and discussion questions make the book well suited to book clubs and classrooms.
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