Showing results by author "Brian Hall" in Literature & Fiction

Brian Hall’s novel vividly re-creates Lewis and Clark’s extraordinary journey into the unknown western frontier. Focusing on the emblematic moments of the participants’ lives, the story unfolds through the perspectives of four competing voices - from the troubled and mercurial figure of Meriwether Lewis, the expedition leader who found that it was impossible to enter paradise without having it crumble around him, to Sacagawea, the Shoshone girl-captive and interpreter for the expedition, whose short life mirrored the disruptive times in which she lived.

Longing to escape the rundown commune outside of Ithaca, New York, where she lives with her organic-farmer mother, assorted half-siblings, and a cow named Marilyn, the precociously well-read Saskia White, 12, imagines herself as the noble contemporary of Odysseus, Marco Polo, and Horatio Hornblower. But Saskia's elaborate fantasies are soon upstaged by her real-life, long-lost father, who leads Saskia and her best friend, Jane, on a camping trip that turns into an epic adventure of love, sex, and lies.

Told in short chapters, each of which presents an emblematic incident with intensity and immediacy, Hall's novel deftly weaves together the earlier parts of Frost's life with his final year, 1962, when, at age 88 and under the looming threat of the Cuban Missile Crisis, he made a visit to Russia and met with Nikita Khrushchev.

Mette, a 20-year old programmer of visual effects for video games, lives with her mother, Saskia, an aspiring playwright, in Brooklyn. Mette is a private and socially awkward young woman who finds something consoling in repetitive mathematical calculations. Her disappearance forces Saskia to reunite with Mette's father, Mark, an emotionally distant astronomy professor in Ithaca, to embark on a journey together to find her.