About this item
From the acclaimed author of The Last First Day, here is a beautiful new period novel: a nineteenth-century story of female empowerment before its time, based on the life of Caroline Herschel, sister of the great composer and astronomer William Herschel and an astronomer in her own right. This exquisitely imagined novel opens as William rescues Caroline from a life of drudgery in Germany and brings her to England and a world of music making and stargazing. Lina, as Caroline is known, serves as William's assistant and the captain of his exhilaratingly busy household. William is generous, wise, and charismatic, an obsessive genius whom Lina adores and serves with the fervency of a beloved wife. When William suddenly announces that he will be married, Lina watches her world collapse. With her characteristically elegant prose, Carrie Brown creates from history a compelling story that interweaves familial collaboration and conflict with a haunting exploration of the sublime beauty of astronomy and our small but essential place within a vast and astonishing cosmos. Through Lina's trials and successes we witness the dawning of an early feminist consciousness - a woman struggling to find her own place among the stars.
About the Author
Author website: http://www.authorcarriebrown.comCarrie Brown is the author of seven acclaimed novels -- Rose's Garden, Lamb in Love, Confinement, The Hatbox Baby, The Rope Walk, and The Last First Day-- as well as a collection of short stories, The House on Belle Isle. Her most recent novel, The Stargazer's Sister, was published by Pantheon Books in January of 2016.She has won many awards for her work, including a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, the Barnes and Noble Discover Award, the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize, The Great Lakes Book Award, and, twice, the Library of Virginia Award. Her short fiction has appeared in journals including One Story, Glimmer Train, The Georgia Review, and The Oxford American. Her work has been translated into several languages, and she has appeared at literary festivals, libraries, bookstores, and colleges and universities across the country.A graduate of Brown University and the MFA program in Creative Writing at the University of Virginia, where she held a prestigious Henry Hoyns Fellowship, she has taught creative writing at Sweet Briar College as the Margaret Banister Writer-in-Residence, at the University of North Carolina-Greensboro as a visiting writer, and at Hollins University as the Distinguished Visiting Professor of Creative Writing.Carrie and her husband, the novelist John Gregory Brown, have spent two decades writing and teaching side by side in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains at Sweet Briar College, where John Gregory Brown directs the college's creative writing program. They raised three children at their home on the campus at Sweet Briar. Over the years, the've been fortunate to host many of the world's great writers at their home, and to introduce those writers and their work to hundreds of students.
