From acclaimed novelist Jonis Agee, whom The New York Times Book Review called “a gifted poet of that dark lushness in the heart of the American landscape,” The River Wife is a sweeping, panoramic story that ranges from the New Madrid earthquake of 1811 through the Civil War to the bootlegging days of the 1930s.
When the earthquake brings Annie Lark’s Missouri house down on top of her, she finds herself pinned under the massive roof beam, facing certain death. Rescued by French fur trapper Jacques Ducharme, Annie learns to love the strong, brooding man and resolves to live out her days as his “River Wife.”
More than a century later, in 1930, Hedie Rails comes to Jacques’ Landing to marry Clement Ducharme, a direct descendant of the fur trapper and river pirate, and the young couple begin their life together in the very house Jacques built for Annie so long ago. When, night after late night, mysterious phone calls take Clement from their home, a pregnant Hedie finds comfort in Annie’s leather-bound journals. But as she reads of the sinister dealings and horrendous misunderstandings that spelled out tragedy for the rescued bride, Hedie fears that her own life is paralleling Annie’s, and that history is repeating itself with Jacques’ kin.
Among the family’s papers, Hedie encounters three other strong-willed women who helped shape Jacques Ducharme’s life–Omah, the freed slave who took her place beside him as a river raider; his second wife, Laura, who loved money more than the man she married; and Laura and Jacques’ daughter, Maddie, a fiery beauty with a nearly uncontrollable appetite for love. Their stories, together with Annie’s, weave a haunting tale of this mysterious, seductive, and ultimately dangerous man, a man whose hand stretched over generations of women at a bend in the river where fate and desire collide.
The River Wife richly evokes the nineteenth-century South at a time when lives changed with the turn of a card or the flash of a knife. Jonis Agee vividly portrays a lineage of love and heartbreak, passion and deceit, as each river wife comes to discover that blind devotion cannot keep the truth at bay, nor the past from haunting the present.
From the Hardcover edition.
約尼斯·艾吉
齣生於內布拉斯加州,童年的大部分時光都在密蘇裏州的奧紮剋湖附近度過。
其作品包括《紐約時報》年度矚目好書《可愛的眼睛》和《陌生的天使》,以及新近的《夢的重量》。她曾在明尼蘇達州聖保羅市聖凱瑟琳學院和安阿伯市密歇根大學執教多年。現居奧馬哈北部,執教於內布拉斯加-林肯大學。
如果可以,我希望能把情節的發展止於安妮生下雅剋的孩子之後的那段時光,這便是我認為最好的結局。 以大河為源,在河之邊緣生活的那群人們,嘻笑怒罵、愛恨嗔癡,一切都那麼富有讓我們産生最原始的感動之力。當懷孕的海蒂在丈夫被叫走的不安的夜晚裏,翻開安妮百...
評分愛情•血腥•傢族史 文:藍文青 “我傢安妮什麼也不乾,整日坐著閑談,而我在為她造房子。”麵對這樣的承諾,有多少女孩子可以拒絕,更何況連傢人們都拋棄瞭自己的時候,這個叫雅剋的男人拯救瞭自己。瘸腿的安妮,就這麼成瞭雅剋的妻子,成為杜查姆傢的女人。 雅剋果然造...
評分如果可以,我希望能把情節的發展止於安妮生下雅剋的孩子之後的那段時光,這便是我認為最好的結局。 以大河為源,在河之邊緣生活的那群人們,嘻笑怒罵、愛恨嗔癡,一切都那麼富有讓我們産生最原始的感動之力。當懷孕的海蒂在丈夫被叫走的不安的夜晚裏,翻開安妮百...
評分蠻厚的書。大河邊,同一個血脈,三代人的故事。以最末一代的媳婦為主綫,串起三個時代的故事。忽然想起《穆斯林的葬禮》,手法也類似,也是現在時與過去時遙相輝映、互相交織的手法,也是三代人的故事。 一個傢族的興衰,其過程必然是跌宕起伏的,有喜有悲的。在文字的世界裏...
評分蠻厚的書。大河邊,同一個血脈,三代人的故事。以最末一代的媳婦為主綫,串起三個時代的故事。忽然想起《穆斯林的葬禮》,手法也類似,也是現在時與過去時遙相輝映、互相交織的手法,也是三代人的故事。 一個傢族的興衰,其過程必然是跌宕起伏的,有喜有悲的。在文字的世界裏...
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