Dark Water

'Eloquent, impressive . . . while her touch is witty, her manner almost buoyant, her themes are sinister beyond belief. She touches the frontiers of the human' Hilary Mantel Boston, 1833 Aboard the USS Orbis as it embarks from Boston and surges south to round Cape Horn, Hiram Carver takes up his first position as ship's doctor. Callow and anxious among the seasoned sailors, he struggles in this brutal floating world until he meets William Borden. Borden. The Hero of the Providence. A legend among sailors, his presence hypnotizes Carver, even before he hears the man's story. Years before, Borden saved several men from mutiny and led them in a dinghy across the Pacific to safety. Every ship faces terror from the deep. What happens on the Orbis binds Carver and Borden together forever. When Carver recovers, and takes up a role at Boston's Asylum for the Insane, he will meet Borden again - broken, starving, overwhelmed by the madness that has shadowed him ever since he sailed on the Providence. Carver devotes himself to Borden's cure, sure it depends on drawing out the truth about that terrible voyage. But though he raises up monsters, they will not rest. So Carver must return once more to the edge of the sea and confront the man - and the myth - that lie in dark water. Elizabeth Lowry's gothic masterpiece, like Golden Hill and The Essex Serpent , gives the historical novel a new, beating heart. In Carver and Borden, she realizes the dichotomy of savagery and reason, of man and monster, of life and sacrifice, in a tale rich with adventure and glorious imagination.

Questions swirl around this novel and lend its plot a snap of suspense. Part of the pleasure of "Dark Water" comes from its elevated language. With a poet's flair for the evocative detail . . . her sentences are often florid without feeling overdone, and regularly demand to be savored.

Préface
Longlisted for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction. A doctor looks back on the patient whose dark secret changed his understanding of what makes us human.

Auteur
Elizabeth Lowry was born in Washington, DC and educated in South Africa and England. She lives and works in Oxford. Her first novel, The Bellini Madonna, was published in 2008 to great acclaim; her second, Dark Water, was published in 2018 and longlisted for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction. She is a frequent contributor to the London Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, The Guardian and The Wall Street Journal.

Texte du rabat

A ship embarks from Boston in 1833, with a green young doctor on board coming to admire a legendary sea hero also making the journey. The journey goes awry, and the two are reunited as doctor and patient further down the line at a Boston asylum, realising they must return to the sea to confront the mysteries that have shaped their experience. Historical gothic for fans of "Golden Hill" and "The Essex Serpent".