Lost Geography: A Novel - Softcover

Bacon, Charlotte

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0312420528 ISBN 13: 9780312420529

Publisher: Picador, 2002

Synopsis

"Lost Geography rethinks the form of the family novel, opens it up and fills it with fine new breezes. The characters live, and as we follow them from chilly Canada to fashionable Paris and New York, we learn to care for their sorrows and triumphs."--M

About this title

Review:

"Impressive . . . Bacon brings the acute, exquisite eye of a cartographer to this engrossing gazetteer about survival, heartache and the frayed edges of memory." --Los Angeles Times Book Review

"Lyrical and convincing . . . These stories ring true because of Bacon's skill at portraying the complex relations among husbands, wives, lovers and children." --Gloria Rohman, The New York Times Book Review

"Bacon's prose gifts shine." --Seattle Times

"Bacon's prose is lyrical and exact. Her descriptions of the ways in which love compels risk in each generation are fresh and moving, and her portraits of several complex women, each struggling to find her unique strength and identity while passing on a sense of life's possibilities, is often exhilarating. A resonant, impressive debut." --Kirkus Reviews

"A neatly interwoven story of landscape, personal history, and survival . . . With well-drawn characters and a subtle palette for a plot, this is a very good book about loss and change." --Library Journal

"Impressive . . . [Bacon's] prose has a pleasing simplicity that makes the book a quick and pleasurable read." --Publishers Weekly

"I found myself pausing on every page to admire an apt metaphor or psychological insight. And these aren't just raisins stuck in a cake--they're seemlessly incorporated, flowing from paragraph to paragraph." --Newsday

"A gorgeous debut . . . Bacon writes with an elegant calm." --US Weekly

From the Back Cover:

Davis Campbell, son and brother to Scottish fishermen, is determined to flee as far as possible from the sea. So he ends up in the middle of Saskatchewan – where he marries into the life of a remote prairie farm.

It is his descendants whom Charlotte Bacon traces in her remarkable debut novel. Stalwart, tragically dispersed, rootless, yet one of Davis Campbell's granddaughters ends up in France, where she marries an Anglo-Turkish immigrant, part of yet another exiled family on the move.

Through the intense personal dramas, as the setting and characters shift, Charlotte Bacon looks at the whole pattern of migration; why some are locked in places, some ever travelling and how people can adapt to change and loss, to new environment and experience.

'Lost Geography' is a triumph, a wonderful, rich portrait of sixty years of an unforgettable family and an evocation of the migrant in all of us.

About this edition

• Publisher: Picador
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0312420528
• ISBN 13: 9780312420529
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 276