Ship Fever and Other Stories

Name: Ship Fever and Other Stories
Author: Andrea Barrett
ISBN: 9780393347203

Andrea Barrett

award won

score

Andrea Barrett

award won

score

#260 of 8,085 books · #55 in Historical Fiction

Won the National Book Award for Fiction (1996). Also shortlisted or longlisted for 1 other award.

Ship Fever and Other Stories won the 1996 National Book Award for Fiction. The elegant short fictions gathered here about the love of science and the science of love are often set against the backdrop of the nineteenth century. Interweaving historical and fictional characters, they encompass both past and present as they negotiate the complex territory of ambition, failure, achievement, and shattered dreams. In "Ship Fever," the title novella, a young Canadian doctor finds himself at the center of one of history's most tragic epidemics. In "The English Pupil," Linnaeus, in old age, watches as the world he organized within his head slowly drifts beyond his reach. And in "The Littoral Zone," two marine biologists wonder whether their life-altering affair finally was worth it. In the tradition of Alice Munro and William Trevor, these exquisitely rendered fictions encompass whole lives in a brief space. As they move between interior and exterior journeys, science is transformed into malleable, strange and thrilling fictional material.

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