There’s a lot of running away in Tracy Chevalier’s latest book, The Last Runaway. The first runaway is a young English girl, Honor Bright, who sets sail from Bristol with her sister, to join her sister’s fiancé in America, and to seek a cure for her own broken heart. She finds a new life all right, but also finds herself alone, a long way from home, ill, exhausted, bereaved, and in a household among strangers where she has no place.

Life in 1850s Ohio was tough and uncompromising, and Chevalier has depicted it vividly. The climate is harsh, the people unfriendly. The local women even make their quilts differently, though have to appreciate Honor’s skill even if they criticise her designs. If quilt-making is the soft backdrop to the story, with the unlikely friendships it brings, a harsher background is the constant feeling of something or someone in the shadows. For these are the shadows of escaping slaves fleeing north, and with these shadows come tangible physical presence and danger.

Honor finds marriage in this small Quaker community, though this does not bring acceptance. Although the Quakers opposed slavery in principle, it was illegal to help escaping slaves, so most turned a blind eye to the runaways but did nothing to help them. Yet Honor gradually becomes part of the ‘Underground Railroad’ network of those actively helping by giving surreptitious food and water, and carefully camouflaged shelter — which makes her vulnerable to the attention of the merciless slave-hunter, who takes an unwelcome fancy to her from the outset.

Small town Faithwell, Ohio may be, and small-minded many of the characters, but this is a story with large themes, thought-provoking and engrossing.

Chevalier conveys the heart-stoppingly close encounters, the fierceness of friendships, the criticism of the unbending relatives, and the deep silence of the Quakers. And always behind are the shadows in the woods, the footsteps in the barn, and the menace of the slave-hunter.

This is a heart-warming, heart-rending book, which realistically evokes the sweltering atmosphere and the coexistence of freedom and slavery, flight and fright in 1850s America. Read and enjoy.

Tracy Chevalier is at the Oxford Literary Festival.