My Last Continent
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- $17.99
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
It is only at the end of the world—among the glacier mountains and frigid waters of Antarctica—where Deb Gardner and Keller Sullivan feel at home. For the few blissful weeks they spend each year studying the habits of penguins, Deb and Keller can escape the frustrations and sorrows of their separate lives and find solace in each other. But Antarctica, like their fleeting romance, is tenuous, imperiled by the world to the north.
A new travel and research season has just begun, and Deb and Keller are ready to play tour guide to the passengers on the small expedition ship that ferries them to their research destination. Except that this year, Keller fails to appear on board. Shortly into the trip, Deb's ship receives an emergency signal from the Australis, a cruise liner that has hit desperate trouble in the ice-choked waters. And among the crew of the sinking ship is Keller...
As Deb and Keller's troubled histories collide with this catastrophic present, Deb's role turns from researcher to rescuer all too aware that in this land of harsh beauty even the smallest missteps can have tragic consequences.
Midge Raymond is an award-winning short-story writer who worked in publishing in New York before moving to Boston, where she taught creative writing. She has published two books for writers, Everyday Writing and Everyday Book Marketing. Midge lives in the Pacific Northwest, where she is co-founder of the boutique publisher Ashland Creek Press. My Last Continent is her first novel.
‘Half adventure, half elegy, and wholly recommended.’ Karen Joy Fowler, author of We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves
‘Refreshingly different, vivid and immediate. Midge Raymond has an extraordinary gift for description that puts the reader bang in the middle of the action, bang in the middle of its dangerous and endangered world. Her clean, sparse prose pulls us irresistibly into the story and the wider issues it raises. She is clearly a writer in command of her craft.’ M. L. Stedman, author of The Light Between Oceans
‘An original and entirely authentic love story…It recognises that love is seldom simple or exclusive, and that the things that bring us together can also keep us apart.’ Graeme Simsion, author of The Rosie Project
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Raymond's (Learning English) first novel is both a complicated love story and an education in the plight of penguins in Antarctica, showcasing the beauty and terror unique to one of the world's most remote terrains. The many facts about penguins are compelling, though the book veers dangerously close at times to being a jeremiad on the effects of humans on the birds' now precarious lives. At the heart of the story is the complex relationship between Deb Gardner, a penguin researcher, and Keller Sullivan, a former Boston attorney whose tragic home life is the catalyst for his escape to Antarctica, moving up the ranks to become a nature guide. While the author skillfully captures the stunning and singular landscape and its special inhabitants, her depiction of the human relationships are less successful: from the frustrating on again, off again nature of Deb and Keller's partnership (they are primarily only together in Antarctica during tourist season), to one tourist committing suicide because of his wife's infidelity and another tourist couple's stereotyped arguments about their readiness for parenthood. There's also a later plot point that's a dud. Still, Raymond's novel has its high points, and will appeal most to environmentally minded armchair adventurists.
