Curiosities

Fleming, Anne

ISBN 10: 1039004970 / ISBN 13: 9781039004979

Published by Knopf Canada, 2024

May have limited writing in cover pages. Pages are unmarked. ~ ThriftBooks: Read More, Spend Less. Seller Inventory # G1039004970I4N00

Synopsis:

An inventive, thrilling genre- and gender-bending historical novel with a modern twist.

Curiosities opens with a present-day amateur historian, Anne, who describes her unexpected discovery of five seventeenth-century manuscripts that, astonishingly, tell the same strange story from vastly different points of view. The five manuscripts spin this tale: after the Plague descends upon a village in England, two small children, Joan and Thomasina, are the only survivors. They bond tightly with each other and with a woman living in the forest nearby, who discovers and cares for them. When people return, the woman, as the lone adult alive, is accused of witchcraft, and the children are separated. Joan is taken on as a maid in the local manor house, and through her intelligence and skill becomes a companion to the fascinating Lady Margaret Long. Thomasina, sent on a sea voyage to Virginia, adopts boy’s clothing and navigates life as a man named Tom. 

Tom and Joan find each other as adults and fall in love, but are discovered together, naked, by a young clergyman. Shocked and horrified, he believes there is but one explanation for Tom’s state: Joan must be a witch. Desperate to save both himself and Joan, Tom runs as far away as he can, to the North Pole. And so it falls upon Anne, the contemporary historian, to piece together these interlocking stories, discover the fate of the lovers, and add her own layer of “truth” to a history and time period when there were no labels for who Tom and Joan might truly be.

About the Author: ANNE FLEMING is the author of Pool-Hopping & Other Stories (Raincoast, 1998), which was shortlisted for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction, the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize, and the Danuta Gleed Award, as well as the much-praised novel, Anomaly (Raincoast, 2005). She is also the author of a middle-grade novel, The Goat (Groundwood, 2017), which was a Junior Library Guild and White Ravens selection, shortlisted for Italy’s Premio Strega, optioned for film, and named one of the Top Ten Children’s Books of the Year by The New York Public Library and the Wall Street Journal. Anne Fleming lives in Victoria, BC.

Bibliographic Details

Title: Curiosities
Publisher: Knopf Canada
Publication Date: 2024
Binding: Hardcover
Condition: Very Good
Dust Jacket Condition: No Jacket