Una, named for the heroine of Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene, flees to the New England coast from Kentucky to escape her father's puritanism and to pursue a more exalted life. She gets whaling out of her system early: going to sea at 16 disguised as a boy, Una has her ship sunk by her own monstrous whale, and survives a harrowing shipwreck:
I was so horrified by the whale's deliberate charge that I could not move. Then my own name flew up from below like a spear: "Una!" Giles' voice broke my trance, and I scrambled down the rigging. No sooner did my foot touch the deck than there was such a lurch that I fell to my face. I heard and felt the boards break below the waterline, the copper sheathing nothing but decorative foil. The whole ship shuddered. A death throe.The ship dies, but Una returns to land to pursue the life of the mind. The novel's opening line--"Captain Ahab was neither my first husband nor my last"--also diminishes Melville's hero in the broader scheme of things. Naslund exposes the reader to the unsung, real-life heroes of Melville's world, including Margaret Fuller and her Boston salon, and Nantucket astronomer Maria Mitchell. There is a chance meeting with a veiled Nathaniel Hawthorne in the woods, and throughout the novel the story brims with references to the giants of literature: Shakespeare, Goethe, Coleridge, Keats, and Wordsworth. Although her novel runs long at nearly 700 pages, Naslund has created an imaginative, entertaining, and very impressive work. --Ted Leventhal]]>
Twenty-year-old Stella Silver, an idealistic white college student raised by her genteelaunts, is not prepared for the events of 1963 in her hometown of Birmingham, Alabama. At first, she keeps a safe distance, but the mounting tragedies send Stella reeling off her measured path. She plunges into the midst of the conflict, setting off a series of changes -- in herself, her relationships, and her future -- as dazzling and powerful as the civil rights movement itself.
This inspiring novel weaves together the lives of blacks and whites, racists and civil rights advocates, and the events of peaceful protest and violent repression to create both an intimate and epic tapestry of American social transformation. Filled with the humanity that is the hallmark of Naslund's fiction, rich in historical detail and evocative in the way the best fiction should be, this novel goes beyond tragedy to redemptive triumph.
]]>How did Sherlock Homes come into possession of a true Stardivarius? Who was the one true love of the great detective's life? And what shattering disappointment left the detective with feelings of overwhelming melancholy? As Holme's great friend, Dr. Watson, sets out to answer these questions and recount the thrilling "lost" adventure of Holmes's attempt to rescue the love of his life from a mad King Ludwig of Bavaria, his own life is threatened by a figure in a familiar Inverness coat and deerstalker cap.
In this extraordinary novel, Sena Jeter Naslund, author of the critically acclaimed national bestseller Ahab's Wife, brilliantly reweaves the colorfully cryptic, fog-enshrouded world of Sherlock in Love is at once a rewarding entertainment and a remarkable homage to the greatest sleuth in literature.
]]>Written with a masterful sureness of hand and heart, these captivating, intimate stories display Sena Jeter Naslund's extraordinary presence as one of today's most rewarding writers of fiction.
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