Archangel: Fiction - Softcover

Andrea Barrett is the author of The Air We Breathe, Servants of the Map (finalist for the Pulitzer Prize), The Voyage of the Narwhal, Ship Fever (winner of the National Book Award), and other books. She teaches at Williams College and lives in northwestern Massachusetts.

*Starred Review* National Book Award winner Barrett (The Air We Breathe, 2007) returns to the short story in her first collection since Servants of the Map (2002), drawing on her fascination with science, the wellspring for her discerning, imaginative, and tender fiction. In the dazzling opening story, young Constantine is liberated from his troubled Detroit home to spend the summer of 1908 helping his dynamic uncle with his experimental farm in a New York State village of exuberant “investigators” busy building and flying an airplane that wins a Scientific American trophy. In the book’s staggering finale, Constantine reappears as a wounded soldier in 1919 stationed in the remote Russian town of Archangel. In between, Barrett incisively portrays women intent on breaking into the male-dominated scientific realm, including intrepid teacher Henrietta Atkins, two science writers, and one of the first X-ray technicians. Reveling in technical innovations and tectonic shifts in ideas and perceptions, Barrett dramatizes the impassioned conflicts engendered by the discoveries of Mendel, Darwin, and Einstein along with the toxic politics of science while celebrating the sharing of knowledge. Most movingly, she considers the subtle ways that, as one character expresses it, “science was influenced by feeling.” Barrett’s consummate historical stories of family, ambition, science, and war are intellectually stimulating, lushly emotional, and altogether pleasurable. --Donna Seaman