Natives and Exotics - by Jane Alison (Paperback)

About the Book

In the manner of W.G. Sebald's "The Emigrants," this novel follows three characters, linked by blood and legacy, through four stories that span a period from the discovery of the first dinosaur bones to the unsettling revelation that the continents drift.

Book Synopsis

In the manner of W. G. Sebald's The Emigrants, Natives and Exotics follows three characters, linked by blood and legacy, as they wander a world scarred by colonialism.

Transplanted halfway around the globe in 1970, nine-year-old Alice, the child of diplomats, is ravished by the beauty of Ecuador, a country her parents are helping to despoil. Forty years earlier, Alice's newlywed grandmother Violet confronts troubling traces of her country's past as she makes a home in the wilds of Australia. And before that, in early nineteenth-century Scotland, Violet's great-great-grandfather George flees the violence of the Clearances for the Portuguese Azores, unaware that he will have a hand in destroying the earthly paradise there.
The third novel by the author of the critically acclaimed The Marriage of the Sea and The Love-Artist, Natives and Exotics is a hypnotic meditation on our passionate, uneasy affair with nature, in which we restlessly search for home.

From the Back Cover

"A kind of family album where, finally, no one is out of place."--The New York Times Book Review
Transplanted halfway around the globe in 1970, nine-year-old Alice is ravished by the beauty of Ecuador, a country her diplomat parents are helping to despoil. Forty years earlier, her grandmother Violet, a newlywed making a home in the wilds of Australia, confronts troubling traces of her country's past. In his time, Violet's great-great-grandfather George flees violence in Scotland, only to unwittingly destroy the earthly paradise he finds in the Portuguese Azores. Natives and Exotics follows these three characters, linked by blood and legacy, in their uneasy affairs with nature as they restlessly search for home.
"In Natives and Exotics, Jane Alison takes us where history books can't or won't go . . . Though set hundreds of years apart, these stories quickly flow into a single narrative powerful enough to show how closely related our familial, political and natural worlds really are." The Washington Post Book World

"Vivid and poignant . . . What gives pleasure is how precisely [Alison] sees the fierce beauty of the natural world, as it moves, grows, evolves, both despite and because of the blind interference of humankind." The Seattle Times
"A family's diaspora becomes an intriguing tale told backward . . . Exquisitely observed, wonderfully off the beaten track."--The Philadelphia Inquirer
Jane Alison is the author of The Love-Artist and The Marriage of the Sea. Born in Canberra, Australia, she grew up in the foreign service and the United States. She now lives in Germany and teaches in the MFA program at Queens University in Charlotte, North Carolina.
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Review Quotes

PRAISE FOR THE LOVE-ARTIST

"A small, twinkling jewel of a novel . . . Wonderfully seductive . . . [Alison] has found a voice, at once modern and archaic, lyrical and potent, that mesmerizes the reader."--Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

PRAISE FOR THE MARRIAGE OF THE SEA

"Beautifully balanced . . . so that the urge to find out what will happen next is counteracted by the wish to luxuriate in Alison's lush, beautifully evocative writing."--San Francisco Chronicle
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About the Author

JANE ALISON is the author of The Love-Artist and The Marriage of the Sea. Born in Canberra, Australia, she grew up in the foreign service and the United States. She now lives in Germany and teaches in the MFA program at Queens University in Charlotte, North Carolina.