Pregnant after rape, seventeen-year-old Josephina Hansen is exiled from her family home in Kiel in the north of Germany. She finds refuge with her sister’s Danish family in Sønderborg, then in Hamburg with a philanthropic businessman and, later, a radical journalist and his sister. In 1880 the worsening political situation forces this makeshift family into exile—and a new life in a small farming settlement in the Kaitieke valley in New Zealand. Accompanying Josephina on the journey is an ancient sewing sampler given to her by her grandmother. In its lovingly stitched pictures she finds a way of mapping the world she has come from—and that is traversed by the birds of her childhood, the Rohrsänger or reed warblers, which migrate yearly from the salt marshes near her home to ‘somewhere nice and warm where the oranges grow.’ Josephina’s story is framed by the reunion of Frank and Beth, descendants of two of her three children by different fathers. It is Beth’s discovery of the reason for the disappearance from the family story of Josephina’s third child that unlocks memory and meaning from the intricately stitched story of the migrating reed warblers.
The Reed Warbler
is a beautiful and rich family saga that weaves together the lives of six generations, overseen, as Josephina’s son Wolf would observe at a family reunion in 1915, by ‘Ma with that glint in her eye.’