Geraldine Brooks - Year of Wonders: A Novel of the Plague

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Table of Contents

[A] vivid drama ... Brooks has clearly done her homework ... she gives us what we want from historical fiction: a glimpse into the strangeness of history that simultaneously enables us to see a reflection of ourselves.

The New York Times Book Review

Intriguing, inventive, and consistently rendered.... An engaging chronicle.

Chicago Tribune

Picturesque ... evocative ... impressively rendered ... Brookss portrait is as faithful as we can hope for.

Los Angeles Times

[A] transporting first novel ... Brooks proves a gifted storyteller as she subtly reveals how ignorance, hatred and mistrust can be as deadly as any virus ... Year of Wonders is itself a wonder.

People

Though the historical detail is absorbing, it is the story of Annaher courage, her struggle to understand Gods willthat is Brookss most wondrous touch. A.

Entertainment Weekly

Beautiful ... deeply involving.... Its no surprise that a novel with the word plague in its title does not provide a happy ending. Yet there is a sense of triumph at its conclusion; Anna emerges as a braver figure than any of the men around her, an amazing, independent young woman who still has a fierce desire to live even after having lost everything meaningful to her.

Newsday

A superb work of historical fiction.

The Denver Post

Year of Wonders is a staggering fictional debut that matches journalistic accumulation of detail to natural narrative flair.

The Guardian

With an intensely observant eye, a rigorous regard for period detail, and assured, elegant prose, Brooks re-creates a year in the life of a remote British village decimated by the bubonic plague.... This poignant and powerful account carries the pulsing beat of a sensitive imagination and the challenge of moral complexity.

Publishers Weekly

Geraldine Brookss Year of Wonders is a wonder indeed: a marriage of language and story unlike anything I have ever read. The novel gives the reader a remarkable glimpse into a seventeenth-century horror, but does so with both compassion and exuberance. Read it for the inventiveness of the language alonea genuine treat.

Anita Shreve, author of The Pilots Wife and The Last Time They Met

Geraldine Brookss impressive first novel goes well beyond chronicling the devastation of a plague-ridden village. It leaves us with the memory of vivid characters struggling in timeless human ways with the hardships confronting themand the memory, too, of an elegant and engaging story.

Arthur Golden, author of Memoirs of a Geisha

I honestly cannot recall the last time I read a novel as riveting, haunting, and authentically rendered as Year of Wonders. This book is astonishing, a small wonder itself.

Chris Bohjalian, author of Midwives and Trans-Sister Radio

Witch-like, Geraldine Brooks transports the reader to a small English village of the 1660s where over half the population is succumbing to the plague. As alive as a Breughel painting, Year of Wonders offers the vitality and variety of lives strangely like our ownprecious and passionate. An unforgettable read, this splendid novel enriches our human memory of both despair and courage.

Sena Jeter Naslund, author of Ahabs Wife; Or, the Star-Gazer

[A]n astonishing re-creation of how it felt to be a victim and survivor of the year of wonders and horrors. Vivid in its humanity, immediate in its narrative, it confirms in compelling terms the universal vulnerability of humankind, and the wonder of survival.

Thomas Keneally, author of Schindlers List and The Great Shame: The Triumph of the Irish in the English-Speaking World

PENGUIN BOOKS

YEAR OF WONDERS

Geraldine Brooks is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of March and Year of Wonders and the nonfiction works Nine Parts of Desire and Foreign Correspondence. Previously, Brooks was a correspondent for The Wall Street Journal in Bosnia, Somalia, and the Middle East. Born and raised in Australia, she lives on Marthas Vineyard with her husband Tony Horwitz, their son Nathaniel, and three dogs.

For Tony.
Without you, I never would
have gone there.

O let it be enough what thou hast done,
When spotted deaths ran armd through every street,
With poisond darts, which not the good could shun,
The speedy could outfly, or valiant meet.
The living few, and frequent funerals then,
Proclaimd thy wrath on this forsaken place:
And now those few who are returnd agen
Thy searching judgments to their dwellings trace.

From Annus Mirabilis, The Year of Wonders, 1666, by John Dryden

Leaf-Fall, 1666

Apple-picking Time

I USED TO LOVE this season. The wood stacked by the door, the tang of its sap still speaking of forest. The hay made, all golden in the low afternoon light. The rumble of the apples tumbling into the cellar bins. Smells and sights and sounds that said this year it would be all right: thered be food and warmth for the babies by the time the snows came. I used to love to walk in the apple orchard at this time of the year, to feel the soft give underfoot when I trod on a fallen fruit. Thick, sweet scents of rotting apple and wet wood. This year, the hay stooks are few and the woodpile scant, and neither matters much to me.

They brought the apples yesterday, a cartload for the rectory cellar. Late pickings, of course: I saw brown spots on more than a few. I had words with the carter over it, but he told me we were lucky to get as good as we got, and I suppose its true enough. There are so few people to do the picking. So few people to do anything. And those of us who are left walk around as if were half asleep. We are all so tired.

I took an apple that was crisp and good and sliced it, thin as paper, and carried it into that dim room where he sits, still and silent. His hand is on the Bible, but he never opens it. Not anymore. I asked him if hed like me to read it to him. He turned his head to look at me, and I started. It was the first time hed looked at me in days. Id forgotten what his eyes could dowhat they could make us dowhen he stared down from the pulpit and held us, one by one, in his gaze. His eyes are the same, but his face has altered so, drawn and haggard, each line etched deep. When he came here, just three years since, the whole village made a jest of his youthful looks and laughed at the idea of being preached at by such a pup. If they saw him now, they would not laugh, even if they could remember how to do so.

You cannot read, Anna.

To be sure, I can, Rector. Mrs. Mompellion taught me.

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