The Fortune's Rocks Quartet

Fortune's Rocks, Sea Glass, The Pilot's Wife, Body Surfing

Contributors

By Anita Shreve

Formats and Prices

Price

$15.99

Price

$20.99 CAD

Format

ebook (Digital original)

Format:

ebook (Digital original) $15.99 $20.99 CAD

This magnificent novel transports readers to the world of a prominent Boston family summering on the New Hampshire coast, and to the social orbit of a spirited young woman who falls into a passionate, illicit affair with an older man, with cataclysmic results.

The Fortune Rock’s Quartet
collects four of Anita Shreve’s most beloved novels-Fortune’s Rocks, The Pilot’s Wife, Sea Glass, and Body Surfing-for the first time. The novels highlight Shreve’s ability to illuminate women’s lives across different eras and share a delightful detail: they are all set in the same coastal New England home, one that has inspired Shreve for over a decade. Any house with age to it can tell a million stories about the families who have lived there, and Shreve has been quoted as saying, ”You could base an entire life’s work on the people who come in and out of a house.”

Fortune’s Rocks depicts a spirited young woman at the turn of the 20th century who falls into a passionate, illicit affair with an older man. In Sea Glass, a young couple’s new marriage is rocked to the core by the 1929 stock market crash. The Pilot’s Wife brings us to the present day, where Kathryn is unprepared her for the late-night knock that lets her know her husband has been killed in a plane crash. Sydney, the heroine of Body Surfing has already been once divorced and once widowed by the age of 29, and finds the fragile existence she has rebuilt for herself threatened when two brothers vie for her affections.

“There’s something addictive about Shreve’s tales,” according to USA Today, and this quality is on full display in the critically acclaimed novels of The Fortune Rock’s Quartet. No one writes more compellingly than Anita Shreve about marriage, family, the depths of our strength and resolve, and the supreme courage that it takes to love.

On Sale
Nov 1, 2010
Page Count
1312 pages
ISBN-13
9780316183574

Anita Shreve

About the Author

Anita Shreve passed away on Thursday, March 29 after a long and very private fight with cancer.  Anita was the author of 18 novels, 14 of which were published by Little, Brown, beginning with Resistance in 1997.  Her novel The Weight of Water won the L.L. Winship/PEN New England Award and was shortlisted for the Orange Prize.  In 1999, Oprah Winfrey selected The Pilot’s Wife for Oprah’s Book Club, and it went on to sell more than 3 million copies.  In all of her work, Anita deftly explored the intricacies and nuances of relationships between men and women, often hinging on the ripple effects of a single, dramatic moment.  She wrote the details of history, from the 19th century to the 1920s to World War II, as if she had lived them herself.

Of her novel Rescue, Augusten Borroughs said,  “Her prose is so flawlessly disciplined and elegant; the characters seem too real to be made out of words and the story she unfolds is gripping, fiercely intelligent and deeply moving.”  These words describe the work but also Anita herself.  Anita was a beloved figure for all of us who had the privilege of working with her.  She was both elegant and modest, kind, funny, and always observant of every nuance of human interaction.  She had impeccable taste and was a thoughtful gift-giver, with a warm laugh and an abiding love for her Boston Red Sox, the Maine coastline, the occasional light beer, and, above all, her children.  She was a beloved wife, mother, grandmother, and friend and we will miss her deeply.  Our thoughts are with her family in this difficult time.

 

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