Stunning evocation of turn-of-the-century Boston and a modern classic of literary romantic fiction.
Set 100 years ago in Boston, FORTUNE'S ROCKS is a classic of literary and romantic storytelling.
Fourteen-year-old Olympic Biddeford is spending the summer with her parents at their seasonal house at Fortune's Rocks. Her father handles her education himself and is in fact a publisher of mildly liberal literature. One author he admires, who also practises as a physician, comes to visit the house. 40 years old, married with four children, he still embarks on an affair with the adolescent girl. They have a swift, passionate summer, torn apart when they are discovered together during Olympic's fifteenth birthday party. She is taken back to Boston, her parents are mortified and remove themselves from society. When Olympic delivers a baby boy nine months later, he is taken from her and she finds herself in exile at a ladies college and then as a governess. She decides she must get her child back, which means returning to Fortune's Rocks...
This sensuality of a girl's rite of passage, the descriptions of landscape, weather, music and light, are vintage.
Shreve and her seventh novel will thrill her many admirers.
Exceptionally fine . . . Shreve writes with power and passion - DAILY EXPRESS
A powerful portrait of that dangerous limbo of a girl's adolescence when she is no longer a child but not yet a woman - LITERARY REVIEW
A quiet but highly charged novel in which intense emotion is counterpointed with an evocation of landscape - Elizabeth Buchan, THE TIMES
It seems like a mighty poem. FORTUNE'S ROCKS, you know, will prove much more than a place name - OBSERVER
Anita Shreve teaches writing at Amherst College and divides her time between Massachusetts and New Hampshire. She began writing as a high school teacher. One of her first published stories was awarded an O Henry Prize in 1975. She became a journalist, spending three years in Kenya. Back in the US, she wrote the non-fiction books Remaking Motherhood and Women Together, Women Alone and began her first novel Eden Close. In 1989, she turned to fiction full time. She is the author of many acclaimed novels and the international number-one bestsellers The Pilot's Wife, Fortune's Rocks and Sea Glass.