From the award-winning author of The Mercury Visions of Louis Daguerre
and The Beautiful Miscellaneous comes a sweeping historical novel set
amid the skyscrapers of 1890s Chicago and the far-flung islands of the
South Pacific.
With critical praise lavished on his first two novels, Dominic Smith has
become a celebrated and deeply revered storyteller. Bright and Distant
Shores, his latest novel, offers a stunning exploration of
late-nineteenth-century America and the tribal Pacific. It's an epic
journey that fans of historical fiction will never forget.
In the waning years of the nineteenth century there was a hunger for
tribal artifacts, spawning collecting voyages from museums and
collectors around the globe. In 1897, one such collector, a Chicago
insurance magnate, sponsors an expedition into the South Seas to
commemorate the completion of his company's new skyscraper--the world's
tallest building. The ship is to bring back an array of Melanesian
weaponry and handicrafts, but also several natives related by blood.
Caught up in this scheme are two orphans--Owen Graves, an itinerant
trader from Chicago's South Side who has recently proposed to the girl
he must leave behind, and Argus Niu, a mission houseboy in the New
Hebrides who longs to be reunited with his sister. At the cusp of the
twentieth century, the expedition forces a collision course between the
tribal and the civilized, between two young men plagued by their
respective and haunting pasts.
An epic and ambitious story that brings to mind E. L. Doctorow, with
echoes of Melville and Robert Louis Stevenson, Bright and Distant
Shores is a wondrous achievement by a writer known for creating
compelling fiction from the fabric of history.
