Fortune's Rocks

Format:	Paperback 464 pages

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Synopsis

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.

Book details

Published
04/01/2001

Publisher
Abacus

ISBN
9780349112763

Publisher and industry reviews

Jacket review

'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

UK Kirkus review

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)