The Voyage Of The Narwhal

Literature & Fiction

BARRETT, Andrea

Contemporary

flamingo, London

Ship Fever

Flamingo

Genre Fiction

NORTON. NY 1998

A crisp clean softcover, no markings throughout:\nAndrea Barrett is best known for her novel The Voyage of The Narwhal and a collection of short stories, Ship Fever. In both these books scientific discovery, history and the natural world are wonderful backdrops to intimate, personal dramas. The Middle Kingdom is an earlier work but the same keen sense of curiosity about life and the way to live it glimmers on the page.\n\nThe novel opens in the recent past, in Tiananmen Square. There is smoke, gunfire and confusion, a sense of history being destroyed and re-made into something else. In the midst of this historical shattering, is a character study of an American woman teaching natural history in a Chinese laboratory. Grace Hoffmeier's story starts off "stunted and stilted, common and sad", but by the end of the novel she has found the "middle way--not too much looking back. Not too much dreaming ahead".\n\nGrace's is an American tale, one of stifling family conflicts; and two bad marriages that look like escape routes, but are just another way of being trapped. Grace overeats to compensate for all her mistakes, to swaddle her desires, to stop herself thinking: "that was how I existed then: push, shut, close, seal, deny, forget". But on a trip to China, with her husband Walter, a meeting at a scientific conference forces her to reassesses her past and take control of her future. Andrea Barrett's prose is lyrical and sure, blending fact with fiction in an elegant meditation on personal freedom and political repression. Grace's story is shadowed by real events in China, giving her voyage of discovery an extraordinary vividness and subtlety. Barrett is unsentimental about country and person and the novel is all the more engaging for of it.

The Middle Kingdom

Literary

The Forms of Water

Flamingo Agencies Ltd.

SHIP FEVER

Short Stories & Anthologies

The Needle's Eye

<p>Simon Camish, an embittered, diffident lawyer in a loveless marriage, would not have particularly noticed Rose Vassiliou had he not been asked to drive her home one night after a dinner party. Yet at one time she had been notorious-her name constantly in the news. Now, separated from her Greek husband, she lives alone with her three children. Despite all the efforts and sneers of her friends, she refuses to move from her slum house in a decaying neighborhood to which she has become attached. Gradually, Simon becomes aware that Rose is a woman of remarkable integrity and courage. He is drawn into her affairs when her husband takes legal action to reopen the question of custody of the children-a scheme for getting his wife back. And, while the precise nature of their ties eludes him, Simon comes to realize that Rose and her Greek ex-husband are forever and inextricably bound to each other.</p>

DRABBLE, Margaret

United States

Harper-perennial

The Voyage of the Narwhal

Biographies & Memoirs

Random House Audio |

<p>Two lifetime friends and partners struggle to make sense of their lives in the rural hills of western Massachusetts when discord enters their marriage. Reprint."</p>

Secret Harmonies

DELACORTE PRESS

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Books by BARRETT, Andrea