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From a PEN/Faulkner Award finalist, When Mountains Walked tells of two parallel love affairs, years apart. In the 1940s, Althea Baines follows her seismologist husband to the heart of the Indian subcontinent to trace the origins of earthquakes. Here, awakening to a form of spirituality she had never imagined, she eventually finds solace with a Hindu priest. Years later, her granddaughter Maggie follows her own idealistic husband to a canyon in central Peru to set up a health clinic. Alive to the culture and the place, Maggie falls recklessly in love with a revolutionary leader and follows him on an apocalyptic trip into the rain forest. As the lives of the two women echo and illuminate each other, and each is swept up in her own time by powerful forces.
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Reviews
"Kate Wheeler comes to the publication of her first novel with a fistful of prizes, glowing reviews for her short fiction (collected in Not Where I Started From) and a reputation as a fine travel writer. When Mountains Walked showcases both sides of her talent. Though the Rosario River Valley is fictitious, Wheeler gives it concrete form . . . The background to the action is all very clear, observ
The New York Times
"As fine as [Not Where I Started From] was, however, it's clear now that it was a mere warmup for her remarkable first novel, 'When Mountains Walked. First novels are often damned with faint praise-arguably, the term itself is a polite way of saying an author's not half-bad for a beginner-but there is nothing apprentice-like in this fine and accomplished book."
The Boston Globe
"The kind of novel you gulp down, curious to find out what happens next . . . A real novel, almost an old-fashioned one. It has plot and character, a climax, a denouement-all assembled by a creator with a sure hand."
The Washington Post