Caleb’s Crossing
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- 75,00 kr
Publisher Description
A novel from Pulitzer Prize-winner Geraldine Brooks, author of the Richard and Judy bestseller ‘March’, ‘Year of Wonders’ and ‘People of the Book’.
Caleb's Experience is inspired by the little known story of the first native American to graduate from Harvard College in 1665. Caleb, a Wampanoag from the island of Martha's Vineyard, seven miles off the coast of Massachusetts, grew up in the first generation of Indians to experience contact with English settlers. (The first English settled the island in 1641, to escape the brutal and doctrinaire Puritanism of the Massachusetts Bay colony.) The story is told through the eyes of Bethia, daughter of the English minister who educates Caleb in the Latin and Greek he needs in order to enter the college. As Caleb makes the crossing into white culture, Bethia, 14 years old at the novel's opening, finds herself pulled in the opposite direction. Trapped by the narrow strictures of her faith and her gender, she seeks connections with Caleb's world that will challenge her beliefs and set her at odds with her community.
About the author
Geraldine Brooks was born and raised in Australia. After moving to the USA she worked for eleven years on The Wall Street Journal, where she covered crises in the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. Her first novel, Year of Wonders, was an international bestseller and she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction for her second, March. She has written three further bestselling novels, Caleb’s Crossing, People of the Book and The Secret Chord.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Pulitzer Prize winner Brooks (for March) delivers a splendid historical inspired by Caleb Cheeshahteaumauck, the first Native American to graduate from Harvard. Brooks brings the 1660s to life with evocative period detail, intriguing characters, and a compelling story narrated by Bethia Mayfield, the outspoken daughter of a Calvinist preacher. While exploring the island now known as Martha's Vineyard, Bethia meets Caleb, a Wampanoag native to the island, and they become close, clandestine friends. After Caleb loses most of his family to smallpox, he begins to study under the tutelage of Bethia's father. Since Bethia isn't allowed to pursue education herself, she eavesdrops on Caleb's and her own brother's lessons. Caleb is a gifted scholar who eventually travels, along with Bethia's brother, to Cambridge to continue his education. Bethia tags along and her descriptions of 17th-century Cambridge and Harvard are as entertaining as they are enlightening (Harvard was founded by Puritans to educate the "English and Indian youth of this country," for instance). With Harvard expected to graduate a second Martha's Vineyard Wampanoag Indian this year, almost three and a half centuries after Caleb, the novel's publication is particularly timely.
