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A heart-breaking novel by a prize-winning young writer.
In a debut novel that is a triumph of wit and feeling, Charlotte Bacon explores the transitions that sixty-years visit upon the members of an unforgettable family-a Saskatchewan woman and her Scottish husband; their plucky daughter, who moves to Toronto; and her remarkable daughter, who lives in France with her Turkish-English husband. Lost Geography takes the complexity of migration as its central subject: Why do landscape, work, and family lock some people in place and release others? In settings both rural and urban, these stalwart, tragically dispersed yet resilient people respond not only to new environments and experiences but, to the eruption of sudden loss and change.
As the settings and characters shift in this wise, resonant book, readers are invited to see how habits of survival translate from one generation to another. How are we like our forebears? How does circumstance make us alter what our heritage has told us is important? With unfailing subtlety and elegance, Lost Geography teaches us, in a luminous sequence of intense personal dramas, that what keeps us alive isn't so much our ability to understand the details of our past as having the luck and courage to survive the assaults of both the present and history.
In a debut novel that is a triumph of wit and feeling, Charlotte Bacon explores the transitions that sixty-years visit upon the members of an unforgettable family-a Saskatchewan woman and her Scottish husband; their plucky daughter, who moves to Toronto; and her remarkable daughter, who lives in France with her Turkish-English husband. Lost Geography takes the complexity of migration as its central subject: Why do landscape, work, and family lock some people in place and release others? In settings both rural and urban, these stalwart, tragically dispersed yet resilient people respond not only to new environments and experiences but, to the eruption of sudden loss and change.
As the settings and characters shift in this wise, resonant book, readers are invited to see how habits of survival translate from one generation to another. How are we like our forebears? How does circumstance make us alter what our heritage has told us is important? With unfailing subtlety and elegance, Lost Geography teaches us, in a luminous sequence of intense personal dramas, that what keeps us alive isn't so much our ability to understand the details of our past as having the luck and courage to survive the assaults of both the present and history.
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Reviews
"Bacon's prose gifts shine."
Seattle Times
"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
"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