Jamrach's Menagerie - Carol Birch [0]
“Transcendently researched, unsparing, and hypnotic, Jamrach’s Menagerie takes us to the edge of endurance where it becomes impossible to distinguish the captor from the captive. Carol Birch’s urgent and wise story goes far beyond any whaling expedition, plumbing the depths of how we create our own humanity. It is a thrill to welcome this remarkable novelist to a larger American audience.”
—Sheri Holman, bestselling author
of The Dress Lodger and Witches on the Road Tonight
“In Jamrach’s Menagerie, Carol Birch quickly sucks you into a world of the senses, from the filthy streets of Victorian London to the rolling hills of the South Seas. Jaffy Brown, the gifted narrator at the center of this mythic tale, rivals David Copperfield and Ishmael of Moby-Dick with his gift for storytelling. His ‘rare old time’ becomes, in due course, a fable of friendship and a tribute to human survival. What a beautifully written and engaging novel!”
—Jay Parini, author of
The Passages of H. M. and The Last Station
“Never mind not being able to put it down—there is a 100-page section in Jamrach’s Menagerie in which you will not be able to breathe. Rarely have I read a book that so deftly marries high literary value with unbearable suspense.”
—Robert Hough, author of The Final
Confession of Mabel Stark, The Stowaway, and The Culprits
“There are enough strange sights, pervasive smells and sounds, and curious characters to keep most novelists—and readers—going strong for three times the number of pages that there are here … She conjures something far stranger and less immediately graspable than a straightforward recitation of facts would allow.… Rendered with exceptional control, elucidating the seesawing bond between Jaffy and Tim and the gradual disintegration of the sailors’ bodies and minds … Birch has spun us a captivating yarn of high seas and even higher drama.”
—The Guardian
“Gripping, grueling seafaring adventure.”
—The Telegraph
“An imaginative tour-de-force, encompassing the sights and smells of 19th-century London and the wild sea … It’s gripping, superbly written, and a delight.”
—The Times (London)
“Attempt to put your finger on how Carol Birch achieves her effects, and they vanish, leaving only a vapor trail of memories of things never known … The reader is carried away forward in a rush of senses: smell, taste, texture, are all there on the page … a masterpiece, the research so well integrated that the material comes across as lived events rather than history … Such is the strength of the world Birch has created … Compelling … permits Birch to set her beautiful, eloquent prose to a new emotional register, at once wistful, wanting, and ultimately satisfyingly serene.”
—Times Literary Supplement
“A gripping tale of adventure and anguish summoned from the deep … A stirring Victorian-era tale so exquisitely written that your eye will yearn to linger over each sumptuous sentence even as your fingers scramble at the paper’s edge to reveal what happens next. Everything you could want in a rousing adventure is here … culminates in a satisfyingly redemptive ending … With my heart pounding hard and fast, I abandoned all thoughts of bedtime and kept turning pages until I’d finished the novel in one whale-sized gulp … Such is the power of Birch’s writing that in common with her sailors, I felt a thirst no amount of water could slake. I felt salt-crusted and festering. I felt the mingled sadness and relief. Jamrach’s Menagerie is a remarkable achievement, full of poetry and poignancy, adrenaline and anguish.”
—The Scotsman
“Riveting … Birch is masterful at evoking period and place … Jamrach’s Menagerie is itself a teeming exhibition of the beautiful and the bizarre, and its serious ideas about the relationship between mankind and the natural world are communicated with such delicacy of touch that they never slow down the propulsive telling of the story or dim the brilliance of the prose.”
—Sunday Times (London)
“Carol Birch’s storytelling excels … Compelling … Birch produces a sustained