Fortune's Rocks - Softcover

Exceptionally fine . . . Shreve writes with power and passion (DAILY EXPRESS)

A powerful portrait of that dangerous limbo of a girl's adolescence when she is no longer a child but not yet a woman (LITERARY REVIEW)

A quiet but highly charged novel in which intense emotion is counterpointed with an evocation of landscape (Elizabeth Buchan, THE TIMES)

It seems like a mighty poem. FORTUNE'S ROCKS, you know, will prove much more than a place name (OBSERVER)

Set 100 years ago in Boston, Fortune's Rocks is a classic of literary and romantic storytelling. Fourteen-year-old Olympic Biddeford is spending the summer with her parents at their seasonal house at Fortune's Rocks. Her father handles her education himself and is in fact a publisher of mildly liberal literature. One author he admires, who also practises as a physician, comes to visit the house. 40 years old, married with four children, he still embarks on an affair with the adolescent girl. They have a swift, passionate summer, torn apart when they are discovered together during Olympic's fifteenth birthday party. She is taken back to Boston, her parents are mortified and remove themselves from society. When Olympic is delivered of a baby boy nine months later, he is taken from her and she finds herself in exile at a ladies college and then as a governess. She decides she must get her child back, which means returning to Fortune's Rocks... This sensuality of a girl's rite of passage, the descriptions of landscape, weather, music and light, are vintage Shreve and her seventh novel will thrill her many admirers.