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The two women's stories collide when they sail on the same ship from London, ''The Marquis of Hastings''. Shipboard conditions are appalling: filthy, reeking and rife with disease, though any woman with money to spare, or the willingness to act as 'wife' to one of the sailors, can buy herself a better passage in one of the upper decks. Rose secures a comfortable cabin for herself and her youngest daughter, Arabella, who has been allowed to travel with her, but Miriam is stuck down below, where she befriends Ma Dwyer, a former brothel-keeper who serves as her surrogate mother.

Upon arrival at Van Diemen's Land, Miriam and Rose escape the horrors of Cascades Factory for Women when the Reverend Sutton hires them to work at his nursery for convict babies. Reverend Sutton, one of the strongest characters, is a horrible hypocrite who denounces sexuality yet is the next-door brothel's best customer; 'half of him is good', one character notes – 'the half the rest of the world sees. The other half is bad all the way through to the core.' When Miriam falls in love with his son John, she too becomes entrapped in the cycle of iniquity and retribution that surrounds female sexuality. Rose is by turns her confidante and her judge as they, with the help of Ma Dwyer, plot an escape from this oppressive atmosphere where the value of motherhood is denied.

With its gritty look at the grim realities of Victorian sexuality, including prostitution, abortion and venereal disease, ''The Night Flower'' also resembles Janette Jenkins's ''Little Bones'' and Michel Faber's ''The Crimson Petal and the White''. Indeed, there seems to be a whole class of books nowadays that seek to expose the sometimes shocking sexual truths behind the repressed image of the Victorian period. ''The Night Flower'' is one of the more successful entries in that subgenre – a somewhat bleak, but still distinctive and well-drawn, character study.

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