The Other Catherine by Lauren Keenan

Lauren Keenan returns to the terrain she writes so well: the lives of women caught in the undertow of history. The Other Catherine is a sweeping novel that threads together two worlds and timelines.

In 1793, eighteen-year-old Catherine is sentenced to transportation on the Tempest, a convict ship bound for New South Wales, Australia. Just one of many, the women are reduced to numbers and cargo. Below deck, in cramped conditions, she endures storms, cruelty, illness and grief. Even in the darkest times, she longs for freedom and is determined to survive. 

A century later in Aotearoa, we meet Keita, a Māori matriarch standing amid the devastation of her whānau and the accelerating arrival of settlers, whalers and empire. Where Catherine’s world is confined and claustrophobic, Keita’s is expansive (whenua, whakapapa and memory) but is being steadily encroached on. Keita is disturbed by the long reach of colonial change and begins to unravel her own story.In both timelines, the true adversary isn’t the other women but the unjust systems around them. Connection, rather than competition, becomes the key to their survival. 

As with The Space Between, Lauren centres women previously at the margins of historical record, exploring what happens when they share their stories. Her storytelling is immersive and uses vivid imagery for building tension. She expertly balances larger historical issues with the everyday realities of survival.The themes of whakapapa, female friendship and the legacies of colonisation are handled with care.

The novel’s structure, spanning generations and places, also reinforces the sense that history is never truly past.“About five years ago, when researching The Space Between (2024), I came across one record that changed everything: an account of my ancestor, Catherine Keenan, a convict from Ireland I’d never heard of before,” says Lauren, who discovered she was convicted for stealing a coat.

“Finding out about Catherine Keenan was remarkable for two reasons. First was learning my surname came from an unmarried woman, who’d passed it to her son. And second that when William Keenan married local woman Kātarina, that hadn’t been her name at all - he’d renamed her Kātarina, a transliteration of Catherine, after his mother. Her original name was something else entirely: Hikimapu.”In historical fiction, there is always tension between the aspects of a novel that make for a good story and the parts that are historically accurate, especially when writing about women as very little exists about them on record, says Lauren.

However, The Other Catherine’s fictional characters were inspired by these women and their lives. With mortality rates on convict ships at the time often exceeding 35 percent, Catherine’s survival aboard the Tempest feels less like narrative convenience and more like a hard-won defiance of the odds.

The Other Catherine is essential reading. It’s a richly evocative historical novel that deepens our understanding of survival, identity and the ways women hold each other up when the world is shifting beneath their feet.

Lauren Keenan’s debut historical fiction novel, The Space Between (Penguin Random House, 2024), won the Best Adult Fiction at the NZ Booklovers Awards 2025. Lauren has a Master of Arts in Taranaki Māori History.

Reviewer: Andrea Molloy

Penguin Random House