Sena Jeter Naslund
Author of:
Adam & Eve |
BOOK SUMMARY: What Happened in Eden?
The New York Times bestselling author of Ahab's Wife, Four Spirits, and Abundance returns with an audacious, provocative novel that envisions a world where science and faith contend for the allegiance of a new Adam and Eve. Naslund explores both the dark nature of fundamentalism and the brightness of true faith in her dazzling novel, Adam & Eve. An eloquent and deeply compelling story of a woman caught between two warring worlds—science and religion—Adam & Eve raises timely questions about identity, innocence, and sin, and represents a new literary high-water mark for the New York Times Notable author and Harper Lee Award-winner.
Hours before his untimely - and highly suspicious - death, world-renowned astrophysicist Thom Bergmann shares his discovery of extraterrestrial life with his wife, Lucy. Feeling that the warring world is not ready to learn of - or accept - proof of life elsewhere in the universe, Thom entrusts Lucy with his computer flash drive, which holds the keys to his secret work. Devastated by Thom's death, Lucy keeps the secret, but Thom's friend, anthropologist Pierre Saad, puts Lucy in harm's way with an unusual and dangerous request about another sensitive matter.
Pierre needs Lucy to help him smuggle a newly discovered artifact out of Egypt: an ancient codex concerning the human authorship of the Book of Genesis. Offering a reinterpretation of the creation story, the document is sure to threaten the foundation of the Jewish, Christian, and Muslim religions ... and there are those who will stop at nothing to suppress it.
Midway through the daring journey, Lucy's small plane goes down on a slip of verdant land between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in the Middle East. Burned in the crash landing, she is rescued by Adam, a delusional American soldier whose search for both spiritual and carnal knowledge has led to madness.( Could it be that his madness is the Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome common in soldiers returning from war and trying to re-enter life as they new it before their war?) Blessed with youth, beauty, and an unsettling innocence, Adam gently tends to Lucy's wounds, and in this quiet, solitary paradise, a bond between the unlikely pair grows. Ultimately, Lucy and Adam forsake their half-mythical Eden and make their way back toward civilization, where members of an ultraconservative religious cult are determined to deprive the world of the knowledge Lucy carries. Set against the searing debate between evolutionists and creationists, Adam & Eve expands the definition of a "sacred book," and suggests that true madness lies in wars and violence fueled by all religious literalism and intolerance.
A thriller, a romance, an adventure, and an idyll, Adam & Eve is a tour de force by a master contemporary storyteller.
Photo of Sena Jeter Naslund by José Betancourt.
REVIEWS OF ADAM & EVE
This thriller is rich in brilliant discourses on religion, fanaticism, the meaning of ancient cave art, the speculative future, and love.
—Library Journal
This …old-fashioned adventure story by the best-selling author of Ahab’s Wife (1999) teases … the reader. Lucy Bergmann is, in her own words, an “ordinary wife of a revered man.” Her husband, highly regarded in the international scientific community, has discovered evidence of extraterrestrial life. Accompanied by Lucy, he takes his findings to a conference in Cairo (the time is a decade from now) and unexpectedly dies there, leaving his material in Lucy’s care. Adding to the distress of sudden widowhood and guardianship of revolutionary data, she is asked to smuggle to Europe an ancient codex offering a new version of the Book of Genesis. The plane she pilots…crashes, affording her an encounter with the gorgeous Adam, an injured, delusional American soldier. They build a relationship in what they regard as Eden, but they must eventually forsake this lush garden to rejoin society; the whys and hows of their expulsion are an even match with the amazing events that have come before. For the first half of the novel, there may be some reluctance to suspend disbelief in the incredible events that unfold. Eventually, however, many will find the metaphorical loftiness engaging.
—Brad Hooper, Booklist
REVIEW OF FOUR SPIRITS
During the civil rights conflict, Birmingham, Ala., was notorious for the ferocity of its racial bigotry: peaceful demonstrators attacked with fire hoses and dogs by police chief Bull Connor; the Klan-set explosion at a black church that killed four little girls. The four victims are only background figures in Naslund's (Ahab's Wife) faithful and moving evocation of the city and the era, but they appear to several characters in the form of spirits who promise the reconciliation to come. The novel is constructed as a series of vignettes that follow a dozen or so characters whose lives finally intersect in entirely credible ways, and who serve as emblems of the divided citizens of Birmingham, some who bitterly fought integration and others who persevered in their struggle for equality. As such, it's a panorama of the social landscape of the Deep South during its violent crucible of change. Naslund, who grew up in Alabama, writes with a deep, instinctive compassion for the South's tragic heritage of racial hatred, and an understanding of the high toll paid by people committed to justice. She develops her plot in a leisurely fashion that initially may leave readers somewhat frustrated, but her method eventually pays off in stunning scenes, vivid with action, color and emotion, that recreate both the horror and the heroism. The characters pivot around Stella Silver, a white college student who is horrified by the glee in her community when JFK is assassinated, and who is moved to activism. In its authentic, balanced evocation of daily life across a wide spectrum of the black and white communities, this novel justifies its length and measured pace, and credibly renders the faith and courage that brought redemption to a blood-soaked city.
—Publishers Weekly
INTERVIEW WITH THE AUTHOR
To read an interesting interview with Ms. Naslund on her earlier work, an interview which provide you with insight into the way the author works,
go to Book Browse at:
http://www.bookbrowse.com/author_interviews/full/index.cfm/author_number/1377/Sena-Jeter-Naslund
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