Charles and Addington Gaunt must find their free- spirited brother, Simon, who has gone missing in the wilds of the American West. They enlist the services of a guide to lead them on their journey across a harsh and unknown landscape. This is the enigmatic Jerry Potts, half Blackfoot, half Scottish, who suffers his own painful past. They are joined by Lucy Stoveall, a woman filled with rage and sorrow over the loss of her young sister Madge who was brutally murdered. She is on a vengeful mission...
After the American Civil War, a young man from Maine takes a diplomatic position in Nagasaki, Japan, where he and his aide, Harada, explore the city and absorb its history and culture. There, they befriend the lovely geisha Cio-Cio and attend her wedding to the American naval lieutenant Pinkerton. When they discover the marriage is nothing but an empty sham, devastating consequences inexorably follow… Derived from Puccini’s grand opera, Butterfly deftly retells the tragic story of the young geis...
"Mesmerizingly twisted, richly layered." --New York Times Book Review "[Norman Lock's fiction] shimmers with glorious language, fluid rhythms, and complex insights." --NPR In his third book of The American Novels series, Norman Lock recounts the story of a young Philadelphian, Edward Fenzil, who, in the winter of 1844, falls under the sway of two luminaries of the nineteenth-century grotesque imagination: Thomas Dent Mutter, a surgeon and collector of medical "curiosities," and Edgar Allan Poe...