Henderson's Spear: A Novel - Hardcover

Wright, Ronald

3.45

102 ratings by Goodreads

9780805069969: Henderson's Spear: A Novel

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0805069968 ISBN 13: 9780805069969

Publisher: Henry Holt & Co, 2002

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Imprisoned in a Tahitian jail while searching for her long-lost pilot father, Liv, a Canadian filmmaker, attemptsto reconstruct her own troubled past and reflects upon the secret journal of her ancestor Frank Henderson, who came to Tahiti with Queen Victoria's grandsons, in a novel that spans one hundred years. 50,000 first printing.

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Review:

"A powerful evocation of the Pacific world...Enough plot, mystery and diversion for your average Victorian triple-decker." Adam Lively -- Sunday Times

"An intriguing, warm-toned, well-written and spirited novel, a credit to its tradition." John Spurling -- Times Literary Supplement

"An unforgettable novel, meant to be read again and again in disbelief and understanding." Lynne Perri, USA Today -- USA Today

"Perhaps the greatest achievement of this novel is the way it reads as something intimate, notwithstanding the grandeur of its scope." Mary Ambrose -- National Post (Canada)

"Reminiscent of Wright's fellow Canadian Margaret Atwood...Capacious, thoughtful, genuinely gripping." James Bradley -- The Sunday Age (Australia)

From the Back Cover:

Henderson is a Man of Empire. He has seen the world ebb and flow. When he dies, he leaves behind a treasure trove of objects, of momentoes to a life well-lived. To his grand-daughter, Liv, he has always been a shadowy figure whose stories exist on an almost mythical plane, until, clearing her mother's house, she discovers his diaries, which offer a glimpse into a world beneath the polished fagade of Victorian England. Some years later Liv finds herself writing to the daughter she hasn't seen since birth and tracing the patterns which have brought her to a Polynesian jail and which stretch back to the last century and to Henderson. In 1892, Henderson set sail on a journey accompanying Queen Victoria's young grandsons, the Princes George and Eddy, on a two year sojourn around the South Seas. During that voyage, the events he witnesses are to have a near fatal effect on his life.

A century later, Liv is left to piece together the fragments of his life and their meaning while at the same time attempting to clarify the more recent past: her own peculiar predicament and the disappearance of her father in the aftermath of the Korean War. The journey she undertakes is as harrowing as anything Henderson experiences but is informed by the weight of subsequent generations...

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