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This is considered one of her best novels and does deserve such praise. A wonderfully descriptive book, it is the attention to detail that makes this such an absorbing read, you can picture every line on each character’s face, each subtle movement that they make. Another book of love, longing and loss beautifully told.
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Synopsis
Fortune's Rocks by Anita Shreve
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 is delivered of 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.
Reviews
'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
There was an enormous and ugly cultural gap between the Haves and Have-nots of American provincial society at the end of the 19th century. When middle-class Olympia Biddeford went - as usual - to spend her 15th summer at the comfortable family summer cottage on the coast of New Hampshire, she knew only one side. She was about to discover the other. In addition to the shock of, almost in a moment, changing emotionally from girl to woman, she finds herself entering a world beyond her over-protected one; experiencing far-reaching, overwhelming, intellectual and temperamental changes, and new awarenesses of her own hidden depths which shake her as a gale shakes a tree. This is an erotic story of illicit love written deliberately with a formality and precision which reflects the punctiliousness of the period, by its very restraint emphasizes the shock of the disruptive events that develop from Olympia's behaviour. These are turn-of-the-century people behaving as the manners and restrictions of the time dictated - until a single touch sends a shiver through the community, releasing all kinds of pent-up feelings and reactions, the whole leading inexorably to a sensational legal battle which strips bare not only Olympia's defiance of the rules of her age, sex and social class (for which she pays the penalty) but the fable of an egalitarian society. An impressive, and marvellously readable novel, very strongly recommended; by the author of The Pilot's Wife. (Kirkus UK)
About the Author
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Anita Shreve is the author of fifteen best-selling novels which have spent more than 100 weeks on the New York Times Bestseller Lists. The Weight of Water was short listed for the Orange Prize and The Pilot’s Wife was selected by Oprah Winfrey’s ‘Book club’ series. Shreve started her writing career as a journalist and her award-winning short stories and non-fiction have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Cosmopolitan and Esquire. Shreve is married to a man she met when she was 13. She has two children and three stepchildren and lives in Massachusetts.
Anita Shreve was our Author of the Month in February 2012.
Author photo © Deborah Feingold
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Family Drama
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