Elizabeth Lowry

'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.

Dark Water

The Chosen

'Does art enhance life, or negate it? The painful question runs through Lowry's portrait of Thomas Hardy, and produces a sombre, delicate novel, finely judged and full of insight' Hilary Mantel One Wednesday morning in November 1912 the ageing Thomas Hardy, entombed by paper and books and increasingly estranged from his wife Emma, finds her dying in her bedroom. Between his speaking to her and taking her in his arms, she has gone. The day before, he and Emma had exchanged bitter words - leading Hardy to wonder whether all husbands and wives end up as enemies to each other. His family and Florence Dugdale, the much younger woman with whom he has been in a relationship, assume that he will be happy and relieved to be set free. But he is left shattered by the loss. Hardy's bewilderment only increases when, sorting through Emma's effects, he comes across a set of diaries that she had secretly kept about their life together, ominously titled 'What I Think of My Husband'. He discovers what Emma had truly felt - that he had been cold, remote and incapable of ordinary human affection, and had kept her childless, a virtual prisoner for forty years. Why did they ever marry? He is consumed by something worse than grief: a chaos in which all his certainties have been obliterated. He has to re-evaluate himself, and reimagine his unhappy wife as she was when they first met. Hardy's pained reflections on the choices he has made, and must now make, form a unique combination of love story and ghost story, by turns tender, surprising, comic and true. The Chosen - the extraordinary new novel by Elizabeth Lowry - hauntingly searches the unknowable spaces between man and wife; memory and regret; life and art.

A seductive mystery novel from the acclaimed author of Dark Water 'Sparkling . . . glowing with wit' Hilary Mantel 'A mystery story, a love story and a comedy of errors . . . A compelling debut that entertains and unsettles in equal measure' Guardian Mawle House. The run-down country seat of the Ropers, a warren of mysterious artefacts and secretive women and - thrillingly - the possible hiding place of a Bellini masterpiece: the elusive Madonna. Art historian and aesthete Thomas Lynch, in disgrace and desperation, knows that finding this painting could resurrect his career. But by immersing himself in Mawle's strange past and stranger present, he soon finds himself entangled in a game of cat and mouse. Lynch will soon learn that in life, as in art, nothing should be taken at face value.

Elizabeth Lowry

About

Books

Join the club