Fortune's Rocks

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Authors: Anita Shreve

Tags: #Fiction, #General, #Boston (Mass.)

BOOK: Fortune's Rocks
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Extraordinary acclaim for Anita Shreve’s
FORTUNE’S ROCKS
“Beguiling and richly rewarding. . . . This story of passion and scandal at the end of the last century is a breathtaking, highly entertaining novel. . . . Olympia may well be the most alluring female since Nabokov’s
Lolita
. . . . No praise is too high for
Fortune’s Rocks.
The book will take hold of you and not let go until the last word.”
—Robert Allen Papinchak,
USA Today
“Shreve is a wildly entertaining novelist. . . .
Fortune’s Rocks
is a classic fin de siècle novel wrapped in millennial optimism . . . a morality tale that reads like something Edith Wharton would have written if she’d been a friend of Gloria Steinem instead of Henry James. . . . Indeed, what makes
Fortune’s Rocks
so compelling is Shreve’s attention to detail and her remarkable restraint.”
—Ron Charles,
Christian Science Monitor
“Anita Shreve, consummate historical novelist, has her own capacity for enthralling the reader and
Fortune’s Rocks
engages totally. . . . Shreve’s ability to build dramatic tension is remarkable.”
—Victoria Brownworth,
Baltimore Sun
“Wonderful. . . .
Fortune’s Rocks
is intelligently told and beautifully written. . . . Shreve makes the reader care not just about Olympia and John, but about the supporting characters as well. She skillfully spins out several subplots, meanwhile tantalizing the reader with hints of what surely must happen next.”
—Michele Ross,
Cleveland Plain Dealer
“Anita Shreve has seduced this reader. . . . She is a skilled storyteller with an uncanny eye for detail: She excels in descriptions of fin de siècle clothing, styles of architecture, the manners and mores of New England families. . . . I found
Fortune’s Rocks
more satisfying than her previous books.”
—Kunio Francis Tanabe,
Washington Post Book World
“Refined in style, powerful in feeling,
Fortune’s Rocks
creates a heroine who risks all for love. . . . The novel works on several levels: as love story, as social criticism, and as a depiction of the manners and mores of a stratified society in 1900. . . . Novelists Willa Cather, Ellen Glasgow, and Edith Wharton all challenged the rosewater-and-lavender tradition of women as creatures of invincible innocence. . . . Anita Shreve writes in this line of literary succession.”
—Peggy Nash,
Dallas Morning News
“This book is not to be missed. . . . Shreve’s writing is just complex and meaty enough to portray the time period perfectly, and it’s a beautifully told story [with] a tense, page-turning trial at the end.”
—Beth Gibbs,
Library Journal
“Shreve unravels her story painstakingly, allowing readers to experience the full measure of Olympia’s struggle as well as Haskell’s alternating periods of romantic passion and aching remorse. . . . Through it all, Shreve carefully contrasts the intellectual with the emotional and draws a compelling portrait of highly moral, ethical people who commit the one unforgivable crime of their time.”
—Diane Carman,
Denver Post
“
Fortune’s Rocks
projects an inevitability and authorial confidence that bristles with the word
now.
Shreve’s heroine is similarly self-assured. . . . This novel of a forbidden love a century ago is a satisfying read.”
—Sunil Iyengar,
San Francisco Chronicle
“Lolita meets Hester Prynne in this sexy, hard-to-put-down novel. . . .
Fortune’s Rocks
has all the ingredients for success.”
—Gabriella Stern,
Wall Street Journal
“Desire takes center stage in
Fortune’s Rocks
. . . . Shreve’s luminous prose is splendid. She plumbs such emotional depths and can describe anything — light, the weather, suffering, remorse, passion, sexuality, despair, clothes. She beautifully documents, explores, and charts the course of this seemingly doomed affair from initial sexual bliss to exposure, expulsion, and exile. All of it is written in a present tense that keeps you on the edge of your seat.”
—Sam Coale,
Providence Sunday Journal
ALSO BY ANITA SHREVE
The Pilot’s Wife
The Weight of Water
Resistance
Where or When
Strange Fits of Passion
Eden Close
The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
FORTUNE
’
S ROCKS
. Copyright © 1999 by Anita Shreve. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.
For information address Warner Books, Hachette Book Group, 237 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10017.
A Time Warner Company
ISBN 978-0-7595-2292-3
A hardcover edition of this book was published in 1999 by Little, Brown and Company.
The “Warner Books” name and logo are trademarks of Hachette Book Group, Inc.
First eBook Edition: April 2001
Visit our Web site at
www.HachetteBookGroup.com
for
John Osborn
gifted reader, great cook
•
I
•
Fortune’s Rocks
I
N THE TIME
it takes for her to walk from the bathhouse at the seawall of Fortune’s Rocks, where she has left her boots and has discreetly pulled off her stockings, to the waterline along which the sea continually licks the pink and silver sand, she learns about desire. Desire that slows the breath, that causes a preoccupied pause in the midst of uttering a sentence, that focuses the gaze absolutely on the progress of naked feet walking toward the water. This first brief awareness of desire — and of being the object of desire, a state of which she has had no previous hint — comes to her as a kind of slow seizure, as of air compressing itself all around her, and causes what seems to be the first faint shudder of her adult life.
She touches the linen brim of her hat, as she would not have done a summer earlier, nor even a day earlier. Perhaps she fingers the hat’s long tulle sash as well. Around her and behind her, there are men in bathing costumes or in white shirts and waistcoats; and if she lifts her eyes, she can see their faces: pale, wintry visages that seem to breathe in the ocean air as if it were smelling salts, relieving the pinched torpor of long months shut indoors. The men are older or younger, some quite tall, a few boys, and though they speak to one another, they watch her.
Her gait along the shallow shell of a beach alters. Her feet, as she makes slow progress, create slight and scandalous indentations in the sand. Her dress, which is a peach silk, turns, when she steps into the water, a translucent sepia. The air is hot, but the water on her skin is frigid; and the contrast makes her shiver.
She takes off her hat and kicks up small splashes amongst the waves. She inhales long breaths of the sea air, which clear her head. Possibly the men observing her speculate then about the manner in which delight seems suddenly to overtake her and to fill her with the joy of anticipation. And are as surprised as she is by her acceptance of her fate. For in the space of time it has taken to walk from the seawall to the sea, perhaps a distance of a hundred yards, she has passed from being a girl, with a child’s pent-up and nearly frenzied need to sweep away the rooms and cobwebs of her winter, to being a woman.
It is the twentieth day of June in the last year of the century, and she is fifteen years old.

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