Savage Lands - Hardcover

Clark, Clare

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0151014736 ISBN 13: 9780151014736

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010

Synopsis

It is 1704 and, while the Sun King Louis XIV rules France from the splendour of Versailles, Louisiana, the new and vast colony named in his honour, is home to fewer than two hundred souls. When a demand is sent requesting wives be dispatched for the struggling settlers, Elisabeth is among the twenty-three girls who set sail from France to be married to men of whom they know absolutely nothing. Educated and skeptical, Elisabeth has little hope for happiness in her new life. It is to her astonishment that she, alone among the brides, finds herself passionately in love with her new husband, Jean-Claude, a charismatic and ruthlessly ambitious soldier.

Auguste, a poor cabin boy from Rochefort, must also adjust to a startlingly unexpected future. Abandoned in a remote native village, he is charged by the colony’s governor with mastering the tribe’s strange language while reporting back on their activities. It is there that he is befriended by Elisabeth’s husband as he begins the slow process of assimilation back into life among the French.

The love Elisabeth and Auguste share for Jean-Claude changes both of their lives irrevocably. When in time he betrays them both, they find themselves bound together in ways they never anticipated.

With the same compelling prose and vividly realized characters that won her widespread acclaim for THE GREAT STINK and THE NATURE OF MONSTERS, Clare Clark takes us deep into the heart of colonial French Louisiana.

About this title

Book Description:

HMH hardcover 2010Previous ISBN 978-0-15-101473-6

From the Back Cover:

"What a vivid and complete world . . . vigorous and intense, energetic and absorbing. Clare Clark is one of those writers who can see into the past and help us feel its texture. An extraordinary feat of imagination." -- Hilary Mantel, author of Wolf Hall

 

New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice * Longlisted for the Orange Prize

For fifteen sols a day and a trunk of linen and lace, she had sold herself into exile, the property of the King of France until, in a savage land on the other side of the world, a man she had never met might take her in marriage...

It is 1704, and Elisabeth is among those virtuous few who will be known as casket girls, women recruited through churches to travel from France to Louisiana as wives for its lonely, struggling settlers. Educated and skeptical, she has little hope for happiness in her new life, but she finds herself surprisingly, passionately in love with her charismatic, ruthlessly ambitious new husband. Betrayal is as much a part of the new world as the old, though, and Elisabeth will find many surprises in her new home—deception by those she loves and love for those she never expected to know.

"Powerful . . . Clark’s commitment to historical color is matched by the dramatic arc of an engrossing story." —Washington Post

"Genuinely a story to lose yourself in, an intense and satisfying read." —Times (UK)

 

CLARE CLARK is the author of The Great Stink, a Washington Post Best Book of the Year, and The Nature of Monsters.

About this edition

• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 0151014736
• ISBN 13: 9780151014736
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 384