House Arrest
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
In superbly crafted prose, Mary Morris captures the drama—and danger—in the everyday and on the road. In her novels, short stories, and travel memoirs, including the acclaimed Nothing to Declare, Morris has dazzled us with her command of location—rendering the unfamiliar places that are not home, the shadowy terrain of memory and love. Returning to the Latin America she knows so well, Morris tells the gripping tale of two women from different cultures whose lives intersect at a point that promises freedom to one and disaster to the other.
Maggie Conover, a travel writer on assignment in the Caribbean island nation known as la isla, is being held in detention, restricted to her hotel. The authorities are interested in her friendship with Isabel Calderón, the fiery daughter of the island’s revolutionary leader. Maggie met Isabel on a previous visit and was struck by her independence, her disgust for her father, and her intense longing to escape. Now Isabel has disappeared, and Maggie is suspected of knowing her whereabouts.
As Maggie is interrogated, bullied, and brought to a fever pitch of anxiety, she recalls Isabel’s courage, her own troubled past, and her conflicted feelings for her husband and father. Maggie’s struggle with her fear of confinement and need for flight brings the novel to a climax of rich psychological complexity.
Mary Morris captures the terror at the heart of this ordeal with the same subtlety that she uses to probe the complicate relationship between Maggie and Isabel. Suspenseful, yet finely textured, House Arrest is a tour de force of political and personal intrigue.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A small Caribbean island whose people are starved for food and freedom is the setting for Morris's fourth novel (after A Mother's Love). Like Morris, who is also a travel writer (Nothing to Declare), protagonist Maggie Conover writes for a travel magazine. She has returned to la isla to update a guidebook she wrote two years earlier. It's a bad idea: during her previous visit, she secretly gave her passport to Isabel Calderon, the outspokenly disenchanted daughter of the dictator, El Caballo, so that Isabel could flee the island in disguise. Maggie's naivete in returning to this totalitarian state is compounded by her behavior after she's arrested and detained in a seedy hotel. Slow to discern the danger of her position, she never contacts the embassy or a lawyer, in spite of her interrogation by a greasy government functionary, and other frightening incidents. Were this the only improbability, the reader might overlook Maggie's passivity, especially since Morris does provide some motivation for her flaky behavior. But it's hard to accept that Isabel, her mother and her daughter each achieve instant emotional intimacy with Maggie, immediately pouring out the stories of their lives in dangerously candid detail. These long, lyric confessions provoke echoes of Isabel Allende, but they lack her magic resonance. In the end, it is not Maggie's story but the claustrophobic atmosphere of a country locked in a dictator's iron grip that the reader will find unforgettable.
