Wild and Distant Seas

Beginning in Nantucket in 1849, this novel follows four generations of women, each born with a strange gift, across more than a century and several continents. Evangeline arrives in town and quickly marries Hosea, the proprietor of an inn, only to lose him to the sea two years later. To hold her place she draws on an ability she discovered in childhood, the power to reach into other people's minds and reshape their memories. When a sailor named Ishmael lodges at the inn with his companion Queequeg before shipping out aboard the Pequod to hunt a notorious white whale, Evangeline's life turns again, and a daughter follows. From there the story moves through her descendants: Rachel, who shares her mother's gift; Mara, who forgets nothing and can glimpse the lives of others; and Antonia, who can trace the paths people have walked. Their journeys carry them from Nantucket to Boston, Brazil, Florence, and finally Idaho, as each woman wrestles with inheritance, abandonment, and the pull to chart a life of her own. Borrowing a minor figure from a famous seafaring novel as its starting point, the book spins a sweeping, lyrical saga about mothers and daughters, the stories that bind families, and the cost and gift of seeing too much.