Showing results by author "Katy Simpson Smith" in All Categories

From the author of the highly acclaimed The Story of Land and Sea comes a captivating novel, set in the late 18th-century American South, that follows a singular group of companions - an escaped slave, a white orphan, and a Creek Indian - who are being tracked down for murder.

A Mississippi woman pushes through the ruin of the Roman Colosseum, searching for plants. She has escaped her life, apprenticed herself to catalog all the species growing in this place. Crawling along the stones, she wonders how she has landed here, a reluctant botanist amid a snarl of tourists in comfortable sandals. She hunts for a scientific agenda and a direction of her own.

Spanning 2,000 years, The Everlasting follows four characters whose struggles resonate across the centuries: an early Christian child martyr; a medieval monk on crypt duty in a church; a Medici princess of Moorish descent; and a contemporary field biologist conducting an illicit affair. Outsiders to a city layered and dense with history, this quartet separated by time grapple with the physicality of bodies, the necessity for sacrifice, and the power of love to sustain and challenge faith.

Drawn to the ocean, 10-year-old Tabitha wanders the marshes of her small coastal village and listens to her father's stories about his pirate voyages and the mother she never knew. Since the loss of his wife, Helen, John has remained land-bound for their daughter, but when Tab contracts yellow fever, he turns to the sea once more. Desperate to save his daughter, he takes her aboard a sloop bound for Bermuda, hoping the salt air will heal her.

A lyrical and spellbinding story of love, loss, and war from a standout new voice in fiction. Katy Simpson Smith has already been acclaimed as an "heir apparent to to Michael Ondaatje and Marilynne Robinson." August 1793. On the hot, humid coast of North Carolina, nine-year-old Tabitha fills her pockets with fish bones and shells, to bring the ocean back to her room. The act, perhaps, of a child conceived at sea.