This Desired Place - Hardcover

Older, Julia

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0974148822 ISBN 13: 9780974148823

Publisher: Appledore Books, 2006

About this title

About the Author:

Julia Older is the author of twenty-five books of fiction, poetry, translation and nonfiction. She received a Mary Roberts Rinehart Grant for her first book Appalachian Odyssey, a personal account of her 2,000-mile walk of the Appalachian Trail. Older's short story translations Blues for a Black Cat by French author Boris Vian have editions in the United States and New Delhi, India. Her own stories, poetry and essays have appeared in Best of Furious Fiction Online, The New Yorker, Entelechy International and other publications. She has received Pushcart Nominations in prose and poetry, a First Daniel Varoujan Poetry Prize, Hopwood Award, grants from the Puffin Foundation and Deming Fund for Women, plus residencies at Yaddo, The MacDowell Colony and other writer centers. She writes full time in southern New Hampshire.

From the Inside Flap:

In the second novel of Julia Older's deeply researched trilogy, Thom Taylor is cast onto the lawless Isles of Shoals at the gateway to the New World. Bawdy butcher Babb and his saucy Barbadoes servant are but a few real-life characters and documented events that help and hinder the fictive narrator in this sweeping 17th century saga. Although Shoals mistress Mary Babb, Hampton witch Goody Cole and Strawbery Banke marmalade madams are hardly mother figures, Thom holds onto their apron strings. Just when he's free from gueling cod fishing indenture, he's pressed on a forced march into wilderness by the Portsmouth Provincial Militia. He escapes a bloody northern Indian massacre only to be deployed by Major Walderne and Massachusetts officers in a "mock battle" betraying 300 Native Abenaki to West Indies slavers. Longing for Babb's Barbadoes mistress, and sick of Shoals drink, dice, and deflowering, Thom sets sail with Mainer Captain Phips to salvage sunken gold. A mutinous plot cutting the voyage short returns him to a nest of pirates anchored at the Shoals. Summoned to testify at their trial, Thom and Judge Samuel Sewall are caught in the hanging fervor of Boston big-wig Cotton Mather. Tight-laced Puritans are no match for the spirit and industry of these northerners in this ground-breaking novel. They are the real blood-and-guts of This Desired Place.

About this edition

• Publisher: Appledore Books
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 0974148822
• ISBN 13: 9780974148823
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 456