Andrea Barrett

A literary anthology explores the natural wonders of the frozen landscapes of the Arctic in a compilation of first-person narratives, cultural histories, science and nature writing, and fiction.

For Grace, the ardent yet puzzled heroine of Andrea Barrett's third novel, this trip has been planned as a three week stay; she's to play dutiful wife to Walter, her prominent scientist husband, at the 1986 Beijing International Conference on the Effects of Acid Rain. Walter is twelve years older than Grace, and as sour as the rain he studies; he and Grace are at a particularly troubled point in their marriage. Their rightly circumscribed visit, however, becomes a journey infinitely less tidy and more complex as Grace falls forever out of love with her husband and very much in love with the country and its culture. In the chaos of the Beijing streets and in the home of the new friends Dr. Yu and her son Zoofan, Grace finds the web of life she's been too lost to perceive. "Time you spend in the past and future is time you spend alone, : Dr. Yu tells her "But between them there is a middle kingdom, both feet planted here."

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.

At the age of eighty, Brendan Auberon - once a member of the Order of Our Lady of the Valley - is now a member of the Order of the Old and Crippled and Confined. Before his time runs out, Brendan has one wish: to see his two hundred acres of wooded ridge overlooking what used to be Paradise Valley...before the politicians from Boston, half a century ago, did the unthinkable. They evicted the people from their homes, their towns, their lives and drowned the villages to provide water to the big city. Now, Brendan's memories of his parents and his beloved Abbey can only be found beneath the surface of the Stillwater Reservoir. The Forms of Water is the story of what happens when Brendan - after revealing that he's leaving half the land to his niece Wiloma and half to his nephew Henry - convinces Henry to hijack the nursing home van to make this ancestral visit. What begins as a lark becomes an adventure infinitely more complex for, as the author makes clear with brilliant metaphoric flair, the patterns of family endlessly rearrange themselves, yet remain as closely tied as snow is to rain. For Henry - whose deluded dreams of real-estate development cost him both home and family - the promise of land rolls on his tongue like a truffle. For Wiloma - who, to the chagrin of her children and estranged husband, has become a devotee of The Church of the New Reason - the land is a distraction from her mission to bring Brendan to a place where he might die with his spirit intact. But for Henry and Wiloma's children, Brendan is neither the key to riches nor a soul in need of saving. He's Grunkie, named after a childhood mispronunciation, a force of stability amidst a morass of parental confusion. They want their parents to stop chasing after a past which can never be recovered, and to see what is happening right in front of their eyes. It takes a single misstep one lovely morning for the Auberons to realize that if, long ago, they lost paradise through others' misdeeds, they can regain it only through the integrity of their own behavior. In a world where Wiloma's daughter cries in exasperation, "This family. When am I going to be free?" - where Brendan says wisely, "We're all lonely. It's what we do with it that counts" - we learn that the treasure we seek might lie close at hand.

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.

The novel draws on the experiences and discoveries of real expeditions to the Arctic; sections of the novel are preceded by quotations from writers, naturalists, and scientists of the 19th century. Erasmus Darwin Wells is a naturalist aboard The Narwhal as it sails from the Delaware river for the Arctic with the goal of discovering the fate of expedition of John Franklin (a real expedition). Zeke Voorhees, a childhood and family friend of Wells, is the commander of the expedition. For Wells, the expedition also becomes an inner journey as a rift develops between himself and Voorhees. With the Narwhal's arrival in Arctic waters Voorhees begins the search for the lost expedition by exploring Arctic bays, sounds and coastlines. But as the Arctic winter approaches, the outlets to open waters set into a deep freeze. The Narwhal becomes barricaded by ice in a cove. The challenge now becomes surviving the Arctic winter. The men must deal not only with the harsh physical environment of the Arctic, but they must keep alive their spirit and determination to live. When spring and summer arrive, as more of the frozen waters open up, Voorhees treks inland alone. He leaves Wells in charge of the Narwhal. When Voorhees does not return by the due date, the crew persuade Wells they must leave before winter sets in again. They retrofit a whale boat, so that it can be pulled or sailed along the frozen land, until they reach open waters. «...they fell and stumbled and were relieved only once, when the ice field was smooth and the wind blew from the northwest. That day they set the sails and glided for eight miles: a great blessing, never repeated ...» ( from The Goblins known as Innersuit).

Detached from the rest of the country on the eve of World War I, the tuberculosis-stricken residents of an Adirondack lakeside sanatorium are housed in accordance with their economic status and languish in their isolation before an enterprising patient initiates a weekly discussion group.

And so it came to pass... Through science, faith and force of will, the Harmonics carved out for themselves a society that they conceived of as perfect. Diverse peoples held together by respect for each other and the prospect of swift punishment if they disobeyed their laws. Fertile land that embraced a variety of climates and seasons. Angels to guard the mortals, mystics to guard the forbidden knowledge and Jehovah to watch over them all... Generations later, the armed starship Jehovah still looms over the planet of Samaria, programmed to unleash its arsenal if peace is not sustained. But an age of corruption has come to the land, threatening that peace and placing the Samarians in grave danger. Their hope lies in the crowning of a new archangel. The oracles have chosen the angel Gabriel and further decreed that he must first wed a mortal woman named Rachel. It is his destiny and hers. Gabriel is certain she will greet the news of her bethrothal with enthusiasm and a devotion to duty equal to his own. Rachel has other ideas...

"Twenty essays by veteran writers and master teachers offering advice on fundamental aspects of craft such as characterization, character names, first person point of view, and unreliable narrators, as well as consideration of more sophisticated topics, including imminence, creating tension, and the deliberate manipulation of information to create particular effects"--Provided by publisher.