Due Preparations for the Plague - Hardcover

Hospital, Janette Turner

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0007149271 ISBN 13: 9780007149278

Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company, 2003

Synopsis

A powerful literary thriller from the acclaimed author of OYSTER. Lowell feels contagious with doom. A divorced father with young children, he dreads the anniversary of a hijacked Paris-New York flight on which his mother was killed when he was sixteen years old. Samantha, a survivor of the disaster is plaguing Lowell with phone calls. She says she has information from declassified documents and is obsessed with learning the whole truth about Air France 64. 'What can be worse than not knowing?' she asks. But Lowell only wants to forget. When his father dies suddenly and mysteriously on the anniversary of the hijack, leaving Lowell the key to a locker in an airport terminal, a terrible story unfurls before him. Together, he and Samantha find the truth bearing down on them with the force of an aeroplane exploding. Janette Turner Hospital's electrifying new novel probes with astonishing acuity the murky worlds of espionage and intelligence gathering, the experience of terror and the meaning of survival.

About this title

About the Author:

Janette Turner Hospital was born in Australia and grew up in Queensland. She currently lives in the USA where she holds the position of Professor and Distinguished Writer in Residence at the University of South Carolina. She is the author of five previous novels, including OYSTER, described by the Observer as 'a tour de force.'

From Publishers Weekly:

Hospital (Oyster) is a writer of many gifts; her dark imagination, astute insights into societal interactions and the supple beauty of her prose, provide an irresistible combination. This latest novel is an enthralling tale about the intertwined fates of the survivors and the relatives of those who perished on Flight 64, hijacked by terrorists in 1987. The dysfunctional life of Lowell Hawthorne, a divorced father of two children, is rooted in his mother's death on that flight when he was a teenager ("every year, as September approaches, he believes he has put it all behind him, he believes he has laid the ghosts, he believes he will feel nothing but a dull, almost pleasurable sort of pain, like a toothache. And then: shazam, he is a wreck again"). Hawthorne is also tormented by the fact that his estranged father, an intelligence agent, may have had some knowledge of the hijacking before it happened. When Hawthorne's father dies suddenly under suspicious circumstances and Hawthorne starts getting phone calls from Samantha, one of the 40 children who survived the fatal flight (they were released before the plane was blown up), Hawthorne is finally forced to confront his demons. Together, Hawthorne and Samantha go on a dangerous quest to discover the truth behind the disaster and to understand why there was an apparent government coverup in its aftermath. In intense, lyrical prose, Hospital introduces seemingly disparate characters and places and connects them through an elaborate and poignantly tragic plot, only disrupted by the distracting inclusion of overelaborate descriptions of terrorist tactics. In this age of global terrorism, Hospital's sophisticated psychological thriller offers a thought-provoking glimpse of the sociopolitical intricacies of the individuals and organizations that track terrorism, as well as of the enduring personal struggles of those left behind after an attack
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0007149271
• ISBN 13: 9780007149278
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1