UNITED STATES AUTHOR · FICTION · GENERAL
Andrea Barrett
American novelist and short story writer, who's collection Ship Fever won the 1996 U.S. National Book Award for Fiction
For thirty years, until he retired, my husband stood each fall in front of his sophomore genetics class and passed out copies of Gregor Mendel's famous paper on the hybridization of edible peas.
— from Ship Fever, 1996
Most acclaimed
Ship Fever
1996
One novella and seven stories dealing with science and set in the 19th century. In The behavior of the hawkweeds, the spirit of Mendel, the discoverer of the laws of heredity, haunts a geneticist of whose work Mendel disapproves; in Birds with no feet, Darwin's theory of evolution provides a zoologist with consolation for his personal misfortunes; in The English pupil, Linnaeus, who brought order to botany, must deal with the mental disorder of his advancing age. By the author of The Middle Kingdom.
The Arctic
2006
This book provides a unique and thoroughly researched history of the lands and seas lying north of the Arctic Circle, from their earliest occupation around 12,000 years ago to the present day. Geographically, it embraces all the truly Arctic countries: the northern shores of Russia extend approximately halfway round the northern hemisphere; the United States, Canada and Denmark had their stakes in the Arctic too, and much exploration was undertaken there by Britain. As well as describing the explorers and colonists of the Arctic and the various and thwarted attempts to forge a trade route through the North-West or North-East Passages - including those by the great sixteenth-century explorer Willem Barentsz, and by Henry Hudson, who died after a mutiny and whose name lives on in Hudson Bay - the book also studies the region's indigenous inhabitants, in particular the Inuit and Samoyed peoples. Archaeological evidence of early habitation is considered, including the remarkable Whale Alley on Yttygran Island in Russia's Far East, an Arctic 'Stonehenge'. Later chapters cover the history of whaling, of the Hudson's Bay Company and other fur traders, and of the exploitation of the Arctic's natural resources. In the twentieth century exploration for the purposes of scientific research began and conservation became an important issue. The final chapters consider the survival of the indigenous peoples of the Arctic today, and the strategic and scientific significance of the region. Illustrated with contemporary illustrations, photographs and maps, The Arctic. A History is the only account of the history of the area, and will also appeal to anyone interested in its geography and anthropology.
Lucid stars
1988
The coming apart of what we've come to call the "intact nuclear family" is by now, at the end of the 1980s, familiar territory. But in this passionate and impressive debut we travel where we've never been before--into a world that has no name. What can we call the sum total of these strange recombined patterns of stepparents, half sisters, and understandings that spring up between ex-wives? No one like Benjamin Day has come close to Penny Webb's gravitational field before. And having looked to the night sky for logic and comfort since she was a little girl, Penny at age nineteen knows the real thing when she sees it--all light and fire. What begins as a classic boy-meets-girl tale of 1955, however, becomes something far different when marriage and two children do not bring the Days closer together. Lucid Stars is the moving story of how this family--with its distinctly modern contours--learns how to survive by being a planetary system that happens to be missing its sun.