Black Moon - by Stephen Wright (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

An utterly wild, debauched, romantic, and violent ride inspired by the 18th-century Irish pirate Anne Bonny, reimagined here as Amethyst "Meeks" Connell, one of the most extraordinary outlaws of any age. For readers of George Saunders, Percival Everett, and Maggie O'Farrell.

"This fiercely imaginative, blood-soaked, starry-eyed, and exuberant epic will capture the dreams and nightmares of any daring reader." (Shelf Awareness, starred review)

Meeks is a poor Irish orphan whose energy, wit, and native sensitivity to the "main chance" take her to the unlikeliest of places. She marries into the aristocracy and follows her war-besotted husband into the latest of England and France's seemingly endless scrapes where her husband is killed and she, on her way home, is taken prisoner by pirates, resulting in a tryst with the pirate captain that sets in motion an unlikely turn of events, leading her to join his crew. Upon the open sea, her ambition and cunning become her greatest assets as she reinvents herself anew.

From Irish reformatories to the battlefields of Europe to the swashbuckling high seas, Black Moon introduces a character you'll never forget in an adventurous world you'll never want to leave. Throughout Meeks' globe-spanning narrative, we come to know a heroine of unconquerable ambition, boundless intelligence, and insatiable appetite--and to recognize a lawless, brutal, and bounteous world much like our own.

Black Moon is an ingenious work of ventriloquism and page-turning entertainment from "an extravagantly talented novelist" (The New York Times).

Review Quotes

"A rollicking maximalist yarn . . . Wright does justice to his zesty protagonist with his torrential prose, which channels Rabelais as much as John Barth in its gleeful irreverence. There's much to admire in this bawdy romp."--Publishers Weekly

"A wild romp of an adventure, lush with blood and debauchery...the heroine and her associates offer plenty of humor, thoughtful philosophy, and transcendence...Black Moon, however bloodthirsty, is also a romantic novel: spirited, atmospheric, raging, and joyful unto its unforgettable end."--Shelf Awareness (starred review)

"Stephen Wright's Black Moon tells a boldly entertaining tale, starring a heroine named Meeks who's impossible to resist. Every page of this of this novel is a wild, swashbuckling ride."--Lauren Grodstein, author of A Dog in Georgia and We Must Not Think of Ourselves

"Very little is known about Bonny's life, and Wright has filled that blank canvas edge to edge with a saga as wild, lusty, and bloody as any pirate could want, written in maximalist prose combining Old World, nautical, and invented idioms into sentences of befuddling enchantment...At 80, Wright has the imaginative energy of a randy teenager channeling the vocabulary of Rabelais and Melville." --Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

About the Author

Stephen Wright is a Vietnam veteran, MFA graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and the author of five previous novels. He has received a Whiting Award in Fiction, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Lannan Literary Fellowship, and has taught writing and literature at Iowa, Goucher College, Princeton, Brown, and The New School. He was born in Warren, Pennsylvania, and lives in New York City.