The Lobster Kings: A Novel - Hardcover

Zentner, Alexi

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0393089576 ISBN 13: 9780393089578

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 2014

Synopsis

"Confirms what Touch already prophesied: Alexi Zentner is one of the greatest literary architects and mythmakers working today."―Téa Obreht, author of The Tiger's Wife

From the internationally acclaimed author of Touch, praised as "breathtaking" (People) and "lovely...at once dreamy and riveting" (Washington Post), comes a powerful family saga steeped in the legends of the sea. Set in a lobster fishing village, The Lobster Kings introduces a fiery and unforgettable heroine, Cordelia Kings.

The Kings family has lived on Loosewood Island for three hundred years, blessed with the bounty of the sea. But for the Kings, this blessing comes with a curse: the loss of every firstborn son. Now, Woody Kings, the leader of the island’s lobster fishing community and the family patriarch, teeters on the throne, and Cordelia, the oldest of Woody’s three daughters, stands to inherit the crown. To do so, however, she must defend her island from meth dealers from the mainland while navigating sibling rivalry and the vulnerable nature of her own heart when she falls in love with her sternman.

Inspired by King Lear, The Lobster Kings is the story of Cordelia’s struggle to maintain her island’s way of life in the face of danger from offshore and the rich, looming, mythical legacy of her family’s namesake.

About this title

About the Author

Alexi Zentner is the author of The Lobster Kings and Touch, which was published in a dozen countries. His fiction has been featured in The Atlantic and Tin House. He lives in Ithaca, New York, with his family.

From Booklist

The talented author of the mystical Touch (2011) returns with a much more commercial novel about fishing wars on the fictional Loosewood Island. The Kings family has been fishing lobster for 300 years and is descended from a famous painter who, family legend has it, was married to a mermaid. Now, however, their waters are being invaded by the rough men who work at an overfished neighboring harbor and who dabble in delivering boatloads of meth. Cordelia, the eldest of the three daughters, loves the work and is the obvious heir to her aging father’s business, but her favored place has come at the expense of sibling rivalry. She’s in love with her married sternman and is determined to preserve her way of life, even if it means confronting the men who are cutting her family’s traps. Zentner spends a good deal of time setting up the family mythology and echoing Shakespeare’s King Lear, but when the fishing wars heat up, so does the plot. With its strong female lead and its evocative setting, this could well be Zentner’s breakout book. --Joanne Wilkinson

About this edition

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 0393089576
• ISBN 13: 9780393089578
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 352