Critics' Opinion:
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Published Jul 2014
304 pages
Genre: Literary Fiction
Publication Information
The day of the accident, Jess is in the backyard with a chainsaw, clearing space to build the greenhouse she's always wanted. And, as always, she is thinking of Arthur. Arthur, her colleague in the botany department, who never believed she'd actually start the project. Arthur, who has cut off contact, escaping to the subarctic to study the pines. But now there has been a disaster, connected to Jess's husband's space tourism business: the explosion of a shuttle filled with commercial passengers, igniting a media frenzy on her family's doorstep. Jess's engineer husband is implicated, and she knows there is information he's withholding from her, even as the cameras turn to her for answers.
Struggling, Jess writes to the only person she can be candid with. She writes to Arthur. And in her emails, freighted with longing, regret, and the old habits of seduction, she tries to untangle how her life has changed in one instant, but also slowly, and how it might change still. Unfolding through Jess's emails to Arthur, written in glimmering prose, this extraordinary debut is a dazzling modern-day love story.
"While the plot is smart and raises sharp questions about the dubious ethics of extreme tourism, the epistolary form prevents the reader from becoming completely immersed in the story." - Publishers Weekly
"Foster expertly builds suspense…[Her] absorbing character study couched in a very contemporary cautionary tale is likely to find many fans." - Booklist
"The email setup works unobtrusively to relate events, and the propulsive prose offers a fine portrait of a woman in distress but not going under." - Library Journal
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Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Alyson Foster grew up in Michigan and earned her B.A. in creative writing from the University of Michigan, winning a Hopwood Award for her fiction. She received her M.F.A. from George Mason University, where she was a Completion Fellow. Her short fiction has appeared in publications including Glimmer Train, the Iowa Review, Ascent, and the Kenyon Review. Foster lives in Washington, D.C., where she works for the National Geographic library and writes for the National Geographic News Watch blog
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